If the executives at Dickey’s Barbecue have done their jobs correctly, none of their customers will be aware of the tech stack overhaul the company just took three years to complete. While many tech-centric conversations these days happen around consumer-facing, front-end applications like mobile apps and e-commerce capabilities, Dickey’s Barbecue realized the company had to take a look under the hood to improve tech-based operations.
With the conclusion of Dickey’s NextGen project, operations at the Dallas-based barbecue franchise are much nimbler and faster than before thanks to a simplification of the tech stack, a large portion of which is proprietary and had become outdated. While most of the changes are invisible to the consumer, franchisees and store-level employees will find it easier to make real-time updates to menus and labor schedules without causing a system-wide strain due to the updates.
“We've retooled everything else that's under the hood from a tech stack standpoint, and really moved into microservices with an eye toward being faster, leaner, more flexible, and future-forward,” Laura Dickey, CEO of Dickey’s Barbecue, said.
This is the second part of the company’s two-part technology upgrades. The first part, which happened during the pandemic, was consumer-facing and saw upgrades to Dickey’s website and mobile capabilities. For this second project, Dickey’s executives retooled programming languages, created the same code base for each of the tech stack components, and improved data flow.
In layman’s terms, since Dickey’s had largely built its own system from proprietary parts, the tech stack was largely vertical, with each new improvement being stacked on top of the old one. By getting under the hood and starting from scratch in many ways, the company was able to improve the connective tissue of the tech stack and make it more horizontal and less vertical.
“Instead of the system running like an assembly line, it now runs much in a much more elegant way, like a train line,” Dickey said. “While each component is completely separate, they are connected, where you have all the different lines going to where they're supposed to be from the same hub.”
The result of this behind-the-scenes overhaul has been a much easier and simpler process for employees and franchisees running the stores, the company said.
“If an owner-operator wanted to do an in-store special, or an in-store happy hour, and they didn't want to offer those on their third-party vendor or on the website, it was very difficult to do,” Dickey said. “Now, it’s easy for them to go in and make those type of customizations with fewer clicks. Also, everything for our franchisees is now mobile-friendly. Managers can now do their scheduling, inventory, pricing, and menu customizations all from an app.”
The bottom line is that while the customer experience remains largely the same, Dickey’s stores are now able to run much more efficiently, which in turn, results in a much better customer experience, even if the changes are invisible to the untrained eye.
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