Hong Kong-based retail food company Fairwood has, in the past few years, established new business and IT strategies to meet the first two major customer needs: ensuring products are available and making checkout faster and easier.

"Fairwood established a new business focus three years ago, to be become the preferred fast food chain in Hong Kong," said Jackson Tse, senior manager, management information system. "To align with this business objective, IT has had to make changes accordingly."

The new IT roadmap includes four different stages, starting from enhancing its point of sales (POS) system to capture data for market analysis, followed by upgrading network infrastructure, then an ERP revamp, and lastly, developments in human resource management systems.

Making checkout faster and easier

One of the new major roles of IT in Fairwood is to enhance the front-end experience for customers during payment.