Le Duff America Enterprise Architecture
(6 Pages | 2566 Words)
Team members: Aakash Patel, Kevin Green, Nhan Do, Kabin Maharjan 1) Company
Overview. Select one of the team member’s company for the project. Concisely describe
the company’s business, its competitive market position, and strategic thrust. (about 1.5
pages). You may disguise the identity of the company, but be sure to provide the name,
title, and email contact of the executive you interviewed. If none of your team members
is currently associated with a company, try to find a company or organization through
your personal network connections, such as former employers, friends, church
members, or neighbors, etc.
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Le Duff America is the North American subsidiary of
Groupe Le Duff, a global bakery and restaurant conglomerate based out of Rennes,
France. Formed in 2002, Le Duff America operates, franchises and licenses multiple
national and regional North American and Canadian restaurant and café brands that are
widely recognized as leaders in the fast casual segment of the restaurant industry. Le
Duff America’s growing portfolio of brands includes Brioche Dorée, Bruegger’s Bagels, la
Madeleine Country French Café, Michel’s Baguette, Mimi’s Café and Timothy’s World
Coffee. Throughout each brand there is a strong commitment to providing quality,
authentic, nutritional and fresh menu items and exceptional service to its customers. The
company has positioned itself to dominate the urban and French bakery/café style
segment of the fast casual restaurant industry.
Locations include, upscale, stand-alone establishments and highly-trafficked,
nontraditional foodservice venues, such as those in malls, airports, universities, and
healthcare hubs. Recent, as well as, future growth and expansion has been well on the
horizon as two of the brands, Bruegger’s Bagels and Mimi’s Café were both acquired
within the last three years and plans to double la Madeleine’s footprint in select markets
is currently underway. Le Duff America has had to modify its IT infrastructure to allow
both its retail and corporate operations to be more efficient across the various brands, as
well as, scalable to accommodate the rapid growth and recent acquisitions. The
organization needed to shift away from the current enterprise architecture in which IT
, was being leveraged to accommodate growing business needs. The overwhelm of new
systems and interfaces, along with increased demands from the business units has put
IT in a position to where they can no longer effectively innovate. A majority of IT
resources were being used on creating piece meal solutions to individual business unit
requests similar to the operating model of a diversification strategy with a maturity stage
of a business silos architecture. If the company was to keep up with today’s competitive
market place in the restaurant industry a revamp of the enterprise architecture would be
needed to allow the organization to achieve the efficiencies and capabilities needed to
compete.
2) IT Management. Interview the CIO (or a senior IT officer) of this company on a
focused topic. This means that you can choose one (and just one) of the facets of IT
management topics we have discussed in class: IT governance, enterprise architecture,
IT-business alignment, problems and issues in IS/IT implementation, outsourcing, etc.
Be sure to include these 2 sections: a) Short case description — concise but sufficient
descriptive details on the company’s efforts in this area. (about 2 pages)
Rapid growth in the organization’s operations has led to an increase in the volume of
transactions processed and systems used to process them across all business activities
within the organization. Not only did this make it a challenge for resources involved in
business activities requiring manual interaction, but it also posed a challenge to the
current IT systems and resources in place. The various business departments within Le
Duff America each have their own dedicated applications to serve its business
processes. Many activities within the organization span across multiple business
departments facilitated primarily by systems and processes dependent on support from
the IT department. The IT systems in place supporting these activities consisted of over
thirty different, custom written programs in various languages interfacing the business
applications together. The pool of these business critical applications spanned across
five servers and ran on various platforms in five different languages making it time
consuming and difficult to maintain. This buildup of disparate systems was an
unavoidable outcome of the acquisitions made by Le Duff America which created a
challenge for the IT department to adapt so many different systems to the corporate
infrastructure given the current IT architecture. Each acquisition led to the IT department
having to maintain different systems and technology for the same business processes
for business departments within each individual restaurant brand. Having to integrate
these new systems required writing more custom applications from the ground up as it
would take more time and resources to dig into existing interfaces and applications to
recode. The new systems were already so widely accepted and used by the business
(6 Pages | 2566 Words)
Team members: Aakash Patel, Kevin Green, Nhan Do, Kabin Maharjan 1) Company
Overview. Select one of the team member’s company for the project. Concisely describe
the company’s business, its competitive market position, and strategic thrust. (about 1.5
pages). You may disguise the identity of the company, but be sure to provide the name,
title, and email contact of the executive you interviewed. If none of your team members
is currently associated with a company, try to find a company or organization through
your personal network connections, such as former employers, friends, church
members, or neighbors, etc.
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Le Duff America is the North American subsidiary of
Groupe Le Duff, a global bakery and restaurant conglomerate based out of Rennes,
France. Formed in 2002, Le Duff America operates, franchises and licenses multiple
national and regional North American and Canadian restaurant and café brands that are
widely recognized as leaders in the fast casual segment of the restaurant industry. Le
Duff America’s growing portfolio of brands includes Brioche Dorée, Bruegger’s Bagels, la
Madeleine Country French Café, Michel’s Baguette, Mimi’s Café and Timothy’s World
Coffee. Throughout each brand there is a strong commitment to providing quality,
authentic, nutritional and fresh menu items and exceptional service to its customers. The
company has positioned itself to dominate the urban and French bakery/café style
segment of the fast casual restaurant industry.
Locations include, upscale, stand-alone establishments and highly-trafficked,
nontraditional foodservice venues, such as those in malls, airports, universities, and
healthcare hubs. Recent, as well as, future growth and expansion has been well on the
horizon as two of the brands, Bruegger’s Bagels and Mimi’s Café were both acquired
within the last three years and plans to double la Madeleine’s footprint in select markets
is currently underway. Le Duff America has had to modify its IT infrastructure to allow
both its retail and corporate operations to be more efficient across the various brands, as
well as, scalable to accommodate the rapid growth and recent acquisitions. The
organization needed to shift away from the current enterprise architecture in which IT
, was being leveraged to accommodate growing business needs. The overwhelm of new
systems and interfaces, along with increased demands from the business units has put
IT in a position to where they can no longer effectively innovate. A majority of IT
resources were being used on creating piece meal solutions to individual business unit
requests similar to the operating model of a diversification strategy with a maturity stage
of a business silos architecture. If the company was to keep up with today’s competitive
market place in the restaurant industry a revamp of the enterprise architecture would be
needed to allow the organization to achieve the efficiencies and capabilities needed to
compete.
2) IT Management. Interview the CIO (or a senior IT officer) of this company on a
focused topic. This means that you can choose one (and just one) of the facets of IT
management topics we have discussed in class: IT governance, enterprise architecture,
IT-business alignment, problems and issues in IS/IT implementation, outsourcing, etc.
Be sure to include these 2 sections: a) Short case description — concise but sufficient
descriptive details on the company’s efforts in this area. (about 2 pages)
Rapid growth in the organization’s operations has led to an increase in the volume of
transactions processed and systems used to process them across all business activities
within the organization. Not only did this make it a challenge for resources involved in
business activities requiring manual interaction, but it also posed a challenge to the
current IT systems and resources in place. The various business departments within Le
Duff America each have their own dedicated applications to serve its business
processes. Many activities within the organization span across multiple business
departments facilitated primarily by systems and processes dependent on support from
the IT department. The IT systems in place supporting these activities consisted of over
thirty different, custom written programs in various languages interfacing the business
applications together. The pool of these business critical applications spanned across
five servers and ran on various platforms in five different languages making it time
consuming and difficult to maintain. This buildup of disparate systems was an
unavoidable outcome of the acquisitions made by Le Duff America which created a
challenge for the IT department to adapt so many different systems to the corporate
infrastructure given the current IT architecture. Each acquisition led to the IT department
having to maintain different systems and technology for the same business processes
for business departments within each individual restaurant brand. Having to integrate
these new systems required writing more custom applications from the ground up as it
would take more time and resources to dig into existing interfaces and applications to
recode. The new systems were already so widely accepted and used by the business
