With 170,000 transactions or more moving through the online ordering systems of Domino’s Pizza during Super Bowl Sunday, the chain’s information technology department needs to have its game face on.
Lance Shinabarger, vice president of infrastructure and security for Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Domino’s Pizza Inc., spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News just ahead of the Super Bowl about the pressure to perform for the 57 employees on hand at chain headquarters during the big game.
Domino’s, a system of more than 9,541 worldwide restaurants, including at least 4,891 in the United States, monitors all aspects of its online operation during one of the largest pizza ordering and delivery days of the year, from pre-game load testing to after-the-game trash talking.
Shinabarger gives NRN a peak behind the curtain.
How many pizzas does Domino’s expect to move on Super Bowl Sunday and how does that compare to last year?
About 11 million slices, or 1.4 million whole pies. That’s up by about 80 percent from a typical Sunday, and it’s about the same as last year.
What has Domino’s done, IT systemwise, to prepare?
Every year we go through and do extreme load testing. We set up a bunch of synthetic transactions that basically emulates a human placing an order on our system. Because the process is automated, it gives us the ability to ramp up the number of orders to the point where it would be greater than what we’d expect to see during the Super Bowl. We do that because while you might have great estimates [of game-related business], you never know exactly what to expect and you definitely don’t want [systems] to be down during the Super Bowl because about 30 percent of all our orders come through the online channel.
How will Domino’s monitor the online ordering system’s health during the game?
We’ll continue those synthetic transaction tests and watch the results. We also will have some of our folks in the command center actually placing orders into the system. In addition to that, we have a number of monitors that we watch, so every piece of our equipment is monitored by somebody.
What networking components will you be watching closest?
There are the load balancers that let us redirect traffic from one data center to another, if we need to; the firewalls that provide some layers of security; routers; and the actual servers, themselves. We have what we call ‘playbooks’ for every component. They give the normal ranges of operation, so we can do a little health check. If something falls out of its normal range, we sound the alarm.
