Subway is a fast-food franchise operation with some 35,000 restaurants worldwide. Like many big enterprises, it expected to host a new mission-critical spending-management system in-house. It ended up doing the exact opposite.
To get an idea of just how much of a departure Subway made from its original direction, consider the basic facts: The vendor providing the software as a service (SaaS), Coupa Software, is only five years old and is funded with venture capital. Its software is hosted on Amazon.com’s cloud platform. Subway, in contrast, has a big enough investment in its data centers that it could have undertaken the project internally at only an “incremental” cost.
“We didn’t set out to look for a SaaS-based solution at all,” said Carman Wenkoff, the deputy CIO of Subway’s Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC), the unit that negotiates purchasing for Subway franchisees and handles IT needs.