Customer Case Study: Papa John's

With more than 3,400 stores, Papa John’s is the world’s third-largest pizza company. Papa John’s is renowned for its commitment to breaking technology barriers to provide an unprecedented customer experience.

Great customer experience demands the best network technology and business service management partner. Since 2004, Papa John’s has successfully used the OpenNMS platform and the OpenNMS Group as a powerful, flexible and extremely cost-effective network management solution.

The Customer Challenge

Papa John’s was the first pizza take-out company to institute text and online ordering at 100% of its domestic locations. The company also uses a wide array of leading edge technologies to connect more deeply with its customers, including social media, augmented reality and video.

In 2004, IT managers at Papa John’s International had come to the conclusion that their existing network management system (NMS) was not serving them as well as it should. The system was labor-intensive and lacked both the reliability and flexibility that Papa John’s needed to manage its ever-growing network.

In particular, Papa John’s observed that:

• The existing NMS (CA Unicenter) was inflexible, high-cost and labor-intensive.
• Administrators and technicians were unhappy with the agent-based NMS, which often hampered network performance instead of improving it.
• NMS software costs were rising rapidly, into the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

The OpenNMS Solution

Papa John’s installed open source-based OpenNMS in late 2004, and has since obtained a continuing series of successes with better network management and lower operating costs. Among the results:

• Papa John’s reduced its network operating costs drastically.
• Network performance is measurably better, resulting in more satisfied internal and external customers.
• Network management tools are more secure, flexible, scalable and reliable.
• The Network Operating Center is now working faster, better and on a much larger scale.

In the five years since Papa John’s first installed OpenNMS, the pizza company and its network have continued to grow. As a network manager, Chris Rodman describes their system:

Right now in Louisville we’re monitoring around 816 nodes, which correspond to approximately 1,412 actual interfaces and 5,747 services. In 2010, things will ramp up very quickly when we add OpenNMS to the stores. We plan to start monitoring approximately 3,000 nodes and then we plan to monitor other devices in the stores, which would take us up as high as 30,000. Like I’ve said before – OpenNMS is scalable.

Like I’ve said before – OpenNMS is scalable.

Our busiest dataflow for online ordering is dinner and lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Despite this, we could operate throughout the weekend with one staffer – for all of Papa John’s 3,400 locations – if needed.

...we could operate throughout the weekend with one staffer...

Papa John’s customers have noticed. Papa John’s was honored by Restaurants & Institutions Magazine (R&I) with the 2009 Gold Award for Consumers’ Choice in Chains in the pizza segment, ranked first among pizza companies in the 2008 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, and was named 2007 Pizza Today Chain of the Year.

Why Use the OpenNMS Group?

The OpenNMS technology platform is backed by people who share Papa John’s commitment to customer service, the OpenNMS Group.

The small staff at Papa John’s frequently customizes OpenNMS – something they can do because OpenNMS is open source. But they also have a support contract with the OpenNMS Group, and sometimes hire the Group to speed the process.

As Chris puts it:

Our brand was built on quality and that extends throughout the system, even to the configuration of our monitoring solution.

Our business requires a great deal of customized monitoring. Our brand was built on quality and that extends throughout the system, even to the configuration of our monitoring solution. That’s where the team at OpenNMS has assisted us tremendously. They’ve always helped us find the best solution.

The OpenNMS Group is a valued partner.

The OpenNMS Group is truly customer driven. They sell you what you need to get the job done. Other NMS providers are money driven with twice the sales staff. But OpenNMS people don’t beat around the bush. They’re not selling vapor. They tell me like it is; when I should expect to see what I want, or what I honestly won’t see. The OpenNMS Group is a valued partner.