A&W Food Services of Canada, Inc. is a fast-food restaurant chain. The Canadian operation is owned and operated by the privately held A&W Food Services of Canada Inc., based in North Vancouver, British Columbia. In December 2013, A&W was Canada's second-largest fast-food burger chain with 850 outlets after McDonald's with 1,400 outlets.

- A&W needed a centralized & automated system to track, manage projects and report on the status of all tasks related to new restaurant openings and re-image. 
- Operations team spends too much time accessing twenty-four individual systems to extract relevant information to then manually input the data into custom spreadsheets. 

- Documentation is manual, takes a long time, and is not always accurate
- Capturing all the requirements in Excel and validating them individually costs time and human error occurs
- Hosting long meetings in big groups to rank requirements is another time suck and can lead to errors in recording the information
- When stakeholder or teams respond to the requirements, bias can take over, skewing the direction of the decision 

- Solutions found have met all the requirements of the team and more
- Stakeholder collaboration in Olive increased buy-in, resulting in instant user adoption for solution
- 2 Solutions found in Olive
- Solutions found have allowed companies within A&W to move business processes away from manual to automated, saving 6000 hours

Software Selection before Olive

Tariq Chaudhry, PMP A&W leads the team responsible for transforming strategy and goals into projects that create value for A&W.
Part of Tariq’s role is to guide the selection, prioritization, and implementation of initiatives to ensure business objectives and desired outcomes are achieved and resources are maximized, along with managing the digital transformation of A&W through redesigning processes and implementing new technologies.
As Head of Business Transformation, Tariq’s role involves identifying business problems, stakeholders, and asking them to contribute requirements.

Before Olive, evaluating solutions was time-consuming and fraught with risk and bias. Measuring the success of the existing solutions was also difficult. Tariq would spend hours interviewing, shadowing, and having meetings with stakeholders that needed to be included in the projects. As a BA or as a PM Tariq would have to listen for and capture the project requirements manually and work backward to manage the project and map out the process. The process itself is flawed.
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"Traditionally, there's a weakness in selecting technology solutions that deliver impactful, measurable results"

Getting requirements out of people is full of emotion and bias, trying to get people in a room to discuss capture and rank requirements in spreadsheets that go missing is a logistical nightmare. Often stakeholders don’t even know what they want or where to start, and no matter how good intentions are, bias creeps into the process, skewing data. After doing this detective work, Tariq would then present the requirements back to stakeholders for validation (more meetings and spreadsheets). After these high-level requirements were validated, they would then go into an RFQ RFI or RFP to determine the scope of the project.

Why Olive?

Tariq and his team recognized the opportunities and risks that contributed to inefficiencies in the solution evaluation process;
- Documentation is manual, takes a long time
- Capturing requirements in spreadsheets and validating them individually costs time and human error occurs
- Hosting long meetings in big groups to rank requirements is another time suck and can lead to errors in recording the information
- When stakeholder or teams respond to the requirements, bias can take over, skewing the direction of the decision

Individual stakeholders can log in to Olive and rank their individual requirements anonymously to capture how important that spec is in their particular department. This saves A&W hours interviewing, meeting with, capturing, and ranking their needs in spreadsheets and meetings.

In Henry Ford’s example, ask the people what they want they will say faster horses. Olive’s rich requirements library allows you and your stakeholders to access the top requirements used by their peers in other, similar organizations. These libraries help to start the requirements conversations, showing your stakeholders what to consider and what’s out there in the space.

Olive provides a number of features to drive consensus across your team. Through user surveys or in-app collaboration on requirements and objectives, every stakeholder is represented objectively, removing any stakeholder or departmental bias.

Olive allows A&W to view the problem of software selection from an organizational business perspective. Multiple departmental needs are easily captured and ranked accordingly. When apt -  one department can be weighted higher than another, so the solutions recommended are accurate to the organizational needs and free of bias.

With every interaction in Olive time stamped, tagged, and logged, rich due diligence data on their evaluation was available at the press of a button. 

Olive’s agile platform allowed A&W to save time by avoiding redundant sales calls and demos with vendors who didn’t meet the needs/requirements the team had outlined.

“Solutions found with Olive have been fantastic. We’ve had people knocking on our door saying, give me access, I've heard about it, I want it now!”

‍A&W has now implemented a new BI Solution and a new PM and workflow automation Solution. Solutions found in Olive have proven to be extremely well adapted with teams across the organization using them to automate their work and find efficiencies in their process. The user adoption rate is 99%. Solutions found with Olive have saved the operations team more than 6000 hours and is continuing to automate SOPs across the organization. A&W has moved processes from paper trails and emails to seamless automated applications, saving time and money.

‍A&W had 200 people who were using the new solutions and were completely trained within one month, with a community of super users at the helm. Other HO team members have even come up with more ways and ideas to use Olive in the future to solve business problems arising with the right technology solution.

‍In a time where businesses everywhere are weathering the pandemic, time spent understanding and interpreting data is time wasted. Solutions found in Olive, allow the team to figure out challenges quickly and respond with action.
“We need to be reacting to what’s happening right now. How do we want to respond to the changing environment? Before finding a solution in Olive we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Due to the extensive buy-in stakeholders had, word got around that Olive facilitated this solution finding process. Other members of the A&W Business Transformation team requested Olive to find solutions for other business cases.

“My team couldn't wait to use Olive to find other solutions”