Simon Iddon, Group Chief Information Officer at The Restaurant Group (whose brands include Chiquito, Frankie & Benny's, and Garfunkel's), puts his vision and creativity to good use in getting the most out of technology for the benefit of businesses and customers. Over last 24 months he has delivered a major digital transformation programme of all front and back of house systems and processes across all trading formats. The campaign has removed legacy systems and delivered immediate benefits to customers, operational efficiencies, cost savings and increased sales. It has also provided a platform for future enablement. The programme was delivered on time, under budget and exceeded it’s benefits case. Following this, there are improvements to a new data warehouse, automated reporting and insight services delivered through the cloud to provide a single version of the truth, reduced the reporting overhead, and supporting a suite of business KPIs and operational scorecards segmented across brands, divisions and user authorities. Harnessing the enablement platform, the team also launched mobile payments across multiple leisure and concessions formats, fully integrated reservations and affiliates, and soon to deliver integrated consumer feedback tablets and click & collect, followed by order & pay and order-ahead among other consumer digital technology – all using a single fully reusable custom SaaS architecture, allowing each digital service to be turned on and off by site, by brand, according to trading format, operations and customer needs. Iddon embedded his group operations, business projects, data & business intelligence, IT and security teams as enablers and deliverers of business value. The transformation programme not only drove process efficiencies, opened and delivered on new opportunities, cost savings and improved sales, and set up the platform for many of the new services moving forward, it showed the business and the teams at the shop-floor he was listening to what it wanted: better tools, more time with customers, elimination of inefficient legacy processes and the provision of a better experience for customers, employees and support functions. [Read next: The Restaurant Group CIO Simon Iddon's digital transformation vision]