Pizza sauce runs in our veins, says Domino's IT chief

The IT director of Domino's Pizza, Jane Kimberlin, is enthusiastic about the brand and its products - an attitude she expects in all of her tech team.

"Pizza sauce runs through our veins," she told silicon.com, during an exclusive visit to the company's UK headquarters, which occupies a large part of an industrial estate close to the centre of Milton Keynes.

Kimberlin won't employ anyone who doesn't like pizza - though some might argue IT workers' liking for pizza is a given.

silicon.com Retail & Leisure

Get the latest retail and leisure news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the R&L newsletter today!

She explained her approach to delivering the right technology for the pizza chain simply: "Our strategy is based around key areas: people first and foremost. Do I have the right team in place, the right skills in place? The second part is all about processes, making sure the business runs efficiently without adding complexity."

Of course, the real action is in the stores all over the country though and that's where the new technology is going too.

One of the areas she focused on recently is store "out-the-door" times. The team found there was a correlation between reducing the time it takes to get an order out of the store and sales increasing.

So Kimberlin had screens installed around each store kitchen that show the orders in play and the time they took to make, compared with average times across the portfolio.

The average time to make a pizza from order to out-the-door was reduced by just under 20 per cent as a result.

Other innovations that have been relatively simple to implement - but have had an impact on the company's bottom line - are around online ordering. Domino's website accounts for 14 per cent of overall sales in the UK, a real achievement, considering the life of the product.

Kimberlin said: "The whole mobility area is another part of our big solution side, because of the wireless mobile world in which our customers live. So, SMS ordering is a natural part [of the strategy] that came out of that. We'll look at dead time when our customers are in the store. For example 30 per cent of our business is collection, so what do you do with that 10 to 15 minutes they are in the store? Maybe they want to use their mobile device to play some games or whatever.

"Our website is growing exponentially. The site is deliberately very simple. We won't have any pop-ups or anything else emerging because we believe that customers will be on the web and then they'll think 'I'm hungry, I want pizza', go in and order it and then come out again and it should be that simple an experience."

Kimberlin is continually on the look-out for technologies that she might be able to use in the future.

The concept of customers playing mobile phone games in stores is one of the innovations she is piloting. She has also been talking with Microsoft about its tabletop technology, called Microsoft Surface.

She said: "It's very, very early days yet on that but it could be of great benefit on the store-side for customers."

Dominos will eventually have a presence in Second Life but Kimberlin is conscious of the need to make sure the blurring between reality and fiction is very clear in that arena. If customers order a real pizza, while they are in Second Life, it needs to be made obvious to them they are getting a real pizza.

She added: "I think social networking will become incredibly important. Domino's is a brand that 18 to 34 year olds can relate to and they will expect to see that brand appearing on social networking sites, perhaps tapping into their ideas about what's important to them - be that in the way they want the product delivered or the methodology of how they order."

Clearly, Kimberlin approaches technology as a businesswoman rather than a technologist. This stems from starting her career outside of the IT department. She explains: "The pattern in my [working] life has been toys, drugs, drink, power, drink and pizza."

Kimberlin graduated from London University with a degree in French and English. Joined Royle Publications, a greeting cards-to-calendars manufacturer, in the marketing department. It was while working there, she got the opportunity to transfer internally to IT.

She said: "I always wanted to go into business, whatever that might be. Getting into IT gave me the opportunity to move from business-to-business and make a difference. And so, they trained me from grass roots operations to running my own department outside of IT but computerising it."

From there she moved to the toy industry. This formed a critical part of her career, characterised by a succession of mergers and acquisitions. The toy company changed its name about six times in six years but it ended up being called Tonka Toys.

She said: "I was always in the IS arena, as analyst, programmer, project leader, project manager and then I had my dream come true to be appointed a director at the age of 30. I was international IT director at Tonka. That was a young age to reach that level then. It still is now really."

After moving onto Ely Lilly Pharmaceuticals as IT director of the financials and sales systems, she had the opportunity to go to Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries and develop its five-year IT strategy. It was a fantastic opportunity starting with pretty much a Greenfield site. She put in SAP there, which was the smallest company to take SAP at the time.

Then she moved onto East Midlands Electricity (EME), which was acquired by Powergen soon after she joined.

She said: "That was a very exciting time around '99, '98 because the industry was going into deregulation. And then through the year 2000. If you had to work at midnight at the eve of the millennium, it was a very exciting evening to be up there in Nottingham, watching the lights stay on. I did my first in-sourcing there as well. EME had outsourced the IT team and when the acquisition happened with Powergen, we knew it made strategic sense to bring it back in-house, so we in-sourced 350 people."

When she moved to Scottish & Newcastle Retail as IT director there, supporting 2,500 pubs and restaurants, she again reviewed the company's outsourcing policy.

Within three years, the company had sold its pubs and restaurants business to Spirit Group. Kimberlin counts herself lucky to be appointed IT director of the whole business there, which doesn't usually happen when coming in from the acquired business.

She said: "It was a great opportunity to put those two businesses together. We in-sourced here again. I'm a believer in right-sourcing. I'm not anti-outsourcing but I believe you need to understand what is right for your business. Outsourcing is fine if you are looking at a particular area that is not a strategic part of your business. It's an area which is a commodity side where no change is envisaged and you are running at the lowest possible cost. If those three factors are present, then it's right for outsourcing."

Now at Domino's, Kimberlin is at the centre of the business. She performs a number of store visits each month, so the franchisees can report on how the technology is working on site. Every store is controlled by a retail system, giving up-to-the minute sales information. It is used to measure store-by-store performance and to indicate staff allocation needs.

She said: "Domino's was a very important decision for me because I do love retail and I'm a retailer through and through."