Restaurant buyer experiences have undergone an excessive makeover all through the previous few years. With on-line ordering and QR code-driven menus main the evolution, expertise within the again room must be as recent because the meals on the plate for eating places of all sizes.

That was the problem going through QDOBA Mexican Eats, a San Diego, CA,-based fast-casual Mexican restaurant with greater than 740 areas throughout the U.S. and Canada, and shortly Puerto Rico. QDOBA locations a premium on visitor experiences, from taste to dependable connectivity, to make sure that paying for meals, swiping rewards playing cards, and putting on-line orders goes as easily as doable.

A recent community, constructed in-house

Current development, coupled with distinctive pressures introduced on by the pandemic, offered the proper alternative for the corporate to judge its networking options. Beforehand, QDOBA outsourced its complete community—from entry factors and switches to firewalls and Wi-Fi controllers—to a 3rd social gathering that built-in a number of distributors. This strategy turned advanced, rigid, and difficult to handle as QDOBA grew, leading to greater operational prices, extra frequent downtime, a decrease high quality visitor expertise, and even misplaced income.

Gary Burgess, QDOBA’s Director of Infrastructure and Safety, led an initiative to switch the corporate’s complete community. His workforce wished to convey community administration in-house and sought a contemporary, centrally managed, cloud-based resolution that was straightforward and quick to deploy.

A community infrastructure that met these necessities would offer the agility to rapidly and reliably assist new enterprise and expertise necessities, whereas additionally regaining management of day-to-day operations and strategic expertise choices. Defending buyer and cost knowledge is essential for eating places, so QDOBA additionally wished to make sure the safety of its resolution whereas accommodating future plans on the journey to a full SASE  (Safe Entry Service Edge) structure.

Seamless connectivity, superior safety

QDOBA chosen a full-stack Cisco Meraki cloud-managed platform to seamlessly join its restaurant areas and company headquarters. Burgess and his workforce standardized on Meraki MR entry factors for Wi-Fi connectivity in every restaurant, deploying these, together with Meraki MS for switching and Meraki MG mobile gateways, to offer backup ought to the web ever exit at a location.

QDOBA mixed Meraki MX SD-WAN and safety companies from Cisco Umbrella as step one on its journey to a SASE structure. Now, the QDOBA community and safety groups can proactively establish new threats and coordinate remediation throughout their operations in actual time. As a result of the community is cloud-based, it may be managed from the Meraki dashboard, which offers visibility into QDOBA’s community from a single location.

Accelerating the time to profit

Planning and deployment have been dramatically simplified because of the Meraki framework-based strategy. Burgess famous the community buildout timeline was shortened from greater than two months with a conventional strategy to only two weeks with Cisco Meraki.

Accelerating the time to profit has been an enormous win for QDOBA. Here’s a sampling of the outcomes the corporate has skilled:

• Anticipated financial savings of $300,000 in assist prices per yr
• Elevated community uptime, resulting in elevated gross sales and higher buyer experiences
• Unprecedented visibility into technical points by way of the Meraki dashboard—from anyplace
• Shortened implementation timeline for 15 to twenty new deployments per week

For Burgess and his workforce, Meraki has delivered higher simplicity for his or her operations with a facet of enhanced safety and visibility into the complete community. For QDOBA’s company, whether or not they’re visiting in-person or ordering on-line, it means scrumptious recent meals and a visitor expertise that’s second to none.

Learn the complete QDOBA buyer story. Study extra in regards to the Meraki cloud-based platform.

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