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When MOD Pizza opened in 2008, customers had a chance to get a taste of something different. MOD, which stands for “Made on Demand,” offers customizable, artisan pizzas, giving customers a choice of more than 40 toppings with various sauces, and customizable salads —delivered superfast.

MOD in America

But pizza (and salads) alone isn’t what separates the Seattle-based chain from the competition and has made it a rapidly growing success. It now has more than 500 system-wide locations throughout the country. 

Two other factors, in addition to its high-quality, personalized products, set MOD Pizza apart from the crowd. The first is a unique pricing strategy. The size of the pizza and not the number of toppings determines the price. So, no matter how many toppings you want, the price is the same for the size you choose. 

The second factor has proven to be an essential ingredient for success: the human factor. Without dedicated, customer-focused employees, even a restaurant known for its cuisine can be difficult to stomach if the service is poor. Happy employees equal happy customers. In 2015, Fortune Magazine named MOD Pizza “one of the 20 Best Workplaces in Retail in the entire US.”

“For MOD Pizza, providing exceptional employee experiences is key to driving workforce engagement and business success,” says Tara Gambill, senior director of enterprise systems for MOD. And to help maintain those exceptional experiences, MOD Pizza added to its business recipe SAP solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

Keeping up with the MOD Squad 

MOD Pizza has more than 10,000 employees, known as the “MOD Squad” (perhaps influenced by the 1968 TV series of the same name – you remember, the one with Linc, Julie, and Pete.) That works out to hundreds of MOD Squad events occurring every day such as hires, transfers, promotions, and separations, generating a lot of data. 

With the chain’s rapid growth, its legacy technology couldn’t keep up. Data was entered manually, which, in some cases, led to inconsistencies and errors and slowed down operations. The company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resources (HR) systems weren’t integrated, creating information silos. Recruiting and onboarding processes were cumbersome. Those issues and more affected the business efficiency and MOD Squad experience.  

Cooking with SAP

MOD Pizza was looking for a solution to efficiently automate, accelerate, and connect the company’s HR and ERP processes and scale. SAP delivered with SAP SuccessFactors (for HR) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (for ERP). SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) provides the scalable foundation for the company’s digital transformation, and SAP Master Data Integration enables accurate data to be available enterprise wide.

MOD has also employed Qualtrics Experience Management solutions to capture employee feedback and refine recruiting and onboarding processes.

“The ability of SAP SuccessFactors and S/4HANA Cloud, public edition to handle our HR and back-office ERP needs in a scalable and powerful way allows us to leverage an intelligent core and weave all of our end-to-end processes together,” says Tara.

MOD managers can now focus on partnering with their teams instead of being overwhelmed with time-consuming HR and finance processes. “Bringing in this single, cloud-based platform to manage all these activities is a game-changer for MOD,” says Tara.

Out of the oven — automating and integrating

Today, back-of-the-house systems and capabilities – including ordering, inventory, labor management/scheduling, repair, and maintenance costs – are integrated into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, for seamless operation. 

Hiring and onboarding are frictionless and accelerated to help new employees report to work faster and easier. Up to 1,000 new hires are onboarded each month. 

SAP solutions help MOD Pizza manage 400 event data changes daily. By avoiding manual data entry, the chain saves labor – more than 15 hours a week – and eliminates errors. 

It all adds up to a recipe for ongoing success and happiness – for the MOD Squad, the squad’s pizza home, and MOD customers. For its accomplishments, MOD Pizza has been named a winner in the Experience Wizard category in the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

To learn more about MOD Pizza’s Innovation Awards recipe for success, check out their Innovation Awards pitch deck.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , ,

Last month in this column, I wrote about how businesses need to “lock up the front door” to their systems to prevent phishing attacks and take a multi-tiered approach to rethinking the identity of their employees, partners, and customers.

And while we have been banging this drum for quite some time, a new villain has reared its head. In recent weeks, we’ve seen glaring examples of the harm that bad actors have caused to a company’s financial viability and product reputation due to confusion caused by the new ownership and policies at Twitter.

Social media security has just risen to be a top priority for not only CISOs, but CMOs, CFOs, and CEOs. As a result, we can expect it to play a more prominent role in malware attacks, security breaches, and identity verification hoaxes.

Twitter verification troubles

You might have read about the “verified” Twitter account of pharma company Eli Lilly and Co. that shared a tweet that announced, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”

Wow! Did the real Eli Lilly & Company announce that on Twitter? Well, no. In fact, the account that tweeted turned out to be an imposter account. But Twitter followers, investors, media, and others were immediately fooled. They thought the pharma company was bowing to user demands to bring insulin prices down.

When the real Eli Lilly & Co. learned of the fake tweet, it responded on its official account: “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account. Our official Twitter account is @LillyPad.”

Fooled by improper systems in place

Why did the tweet fool so many people? According to The Washington Post, the tweet carried a blue “verified” checkmark. This mark ensured that a brand’s Twitter account was legit, per the Twitter verification system that had been in place for years.

But as a result of the change in Twitter’s ownership to Elon Musk in recent weeks, the old verification system had been dropped and replaced by a new verification system called Twitter Blue. For an $8/month fee, users could gain the verified mark as Musk tried to drum up new revenue sources.

But real identity verification wasn’t high on the priority list. Twitter was not checking the identity of who paid $8/month for the new checkmark. This meant anyone could buy a “verified” checkmark.

This is how the Eli Lilly Twitter brand and others became attacked. Scammers created “fake verified” accounts for politicians, sports athletes, celebrities, and other companies by paying the $8/month checkmark fee. Unfortunately, the flawed identity verification system was already causing big problems, wrote Wired in its piece “Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Scammer’s Paradise.”

As a result of the temporary confusion, Eli Lilly’s stock price was impacted, dropping from $368/share to about $348/share (though it has since rebounded). But the fake tweet also brought attention to the company’s high price of insulin, creating a more significant PR problem for Eli Lilly.

Black hat Twitter actors/pranksters had found a wide-open door for identity fraud and have begun to misuse the verified mark plan for nefarious purposes. This Twitter “attack” on identity has brought the severity of phishing and identity verification to the mainstream.

Those of us in the security and intelligence industry have been talking about bad actor phishing for years, but now it’s become a much larger problem. Will companies take stronger measures to establish higher identity verification security, especially in social media?

Strengthening identity on social media

More of these attacks could be coming. With the uncertainty swirling around Twitter and its directions for users, bad actors might sense an easy play to inflict similar harm to another major brand. And false messages on product pricing is only the tip of the iceberg. Other fraudulent messages or scams could create a call to action, where customers or even employees are duped into sharing their credentials, which would provide access to the front door of the organization.

Now that we have seen how easily brands can be attacked, it seems inevitable that more of these exploits will become the norm. What will happen in the coming weeks to other major entities if this Twitter Blue verification plan is not tightly organized? And going beyond Twitter Blue, fakes can be perpetrated on other social media sites and by setting up phony websites with the same look and feel as the original owned by the brand. How will these be leveraged? The Twitter Blue issue made spoofs simple for any basic attacker to pull off, but any hacker with a higher level of sophistication can leverage more elaborate methods. How can brands and companies best defend all of these channels? 

While the Twitter team is said to be retooling to make it ‘rock solid,’ with plans to relaunch Twitter Blue at the end of November, CISOs need to put in safeguards to prevent fraud before attackers can hurt your brand, move your stock price and maybe even find a path to steal your organization’s data.

These safeguards should extend across social media platforms and the web. This is not just a Twitter issue, despite the media attention. Twitter has made the headlines, but it is a much broader problem for the industry.

Security, Social Networking Apps, Twitter

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , ,

Last month in this column, I wrote about how businesses need to “lock up the front door” to their systems to prevent phishing attacks and take a multi-tiered approach to rethinking the identity of their employees, partners, and customers.

And while we have been banging this drum for quite some time, a new villain has reared its head. In recent weeks, we’ve seen glaring examples of the harm that bad actors have caused to a company’s financial viability and product reputation due to confusion caused by the new ownership and policies at Twitter.

Social media security has just risen to be a top priority for not only CISOs, but CMOs, CFOs, and CEOs. As a result, we can expect it to play a more prominent role in malware attacks, security breaches, and identity verification hoaxes.

Twitter verification troubles

You might have read about the “verified” Twitter account of pharma company Eli Lilly and Co. that shared a tweet that announced, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”

Wow! Did the real Eli Lilly & Company announce that on Twitter? Well, no. In fact, the account that tweeted turned out to be an imposter account. But Twitter followers, investors, media, and others were immediately fooled. They thought the pharma company was bowing to user demands to bring insulin prices down.

When the real Eli Lilly & Co. learned of the fake tweet, it responded on its official account: “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account. Our official Twitter account is @LillyPad.”

Fooled by improper systems in place

Why did the tweet fool so many people? According to The Washington Post, the tweet carried a blue “verified” checkmark. This mark ensured that a brand’s Twitter account was legit, per the Twitter verification system that had been in place for years.

But as a result of the change in Twitter’s ownership to Elon Musk in recent weeks, the old verification system had been dropped and replaced by a new verification system called Twitter Blue. For an $8/month fee, users could gain the verified mark as Musk tried to drum up new revenue sources.

But real identity verification wasn’t high on the priority list. Twitter was not checking the identity of who paid $8/month for the new checkmark. This meant anyone could buy a “verified” checkmark.

This is how the Eli Lilly Twitter brand and others became attacked. Scammers created “fake verified” accounts for politicians, sports athletes, celebrities, and other companies by paying the $8/month checkmark fee. Unfortunately, the flawed identity verification system was already causing big problems, wrote Wired in its piece “Elon Musk’s Twitter Is a Scammer’s Paradise.”

As a result of the temporary confusion, Eli Lilly’s stock price was impacted, dropping from $368/share to about $348/share (though it has since rebounded). But the fake tweet also brought attention to the company’s high price of insulin, creating a more significant PR problem for Eli Lilly.

Black hat Twitter actors/pranksters had found a wide-open door for identity fraud and have begun to misuse the verified mark plan for nefarious purposes. This Twitter “attack” on identity has brought the severity of phishing and identity verification to the mainstream.

Those of us in the security and intelligence industry have been talking about bad actor phishing for years, but now it’s become a much larger problem. Will companies take stronger measures to establish higher identity verification security, especially in social media?

Strengthening identity on social media

More of these attacks could be coming. With the uncertainty swirling around Twitter and its directions for users, bad actors might sense an easy play to inflict similar harm to another major brand. And false messages on product pricing is only the tip of the iceberg. Other fraudulent messages or scams could create a call to action, where customers or even employees are duped into sharing their credentials, which would provide access to the front door of the organization.

Now that we have seen how easily brands can be attacked, it seems inevitable that more of these exploits will become the norm. What will happen in the coming weeks to other major entities if this Twitter Blue verification plan is not tightly organized? And going beyond Twitter Blue, fakes can be perpetrated on other social media sites and by setting up phony websites with the same look and feel as the original owned by the brand. How will these be leveraged? The Twitter Blue issue made spoofs simple for any basic attacker to pull off, but any hacker with a higher level of sophistication can leverage more elaborate methods. How can brands and companies best defend all of these channels? 

While the Twitter team is said to be retooling to make it ‘rock solid,’ with plans to relaunch Twitter Blue at the end of November, CISOs need to put in safeguards to prevent fraud before attackers can hurt your brand, move your stock price and maybe even find a path to steal your organization’s data.

These safeguards should extend across social media platforms and the web. This is not just a Twitter issue, despite the media attention. Twitter has made the headlines, but it is a much broader problem for the industry.

Security, Social Networking Apps, Twitter

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Google on Tuesday said it would be adding new cloud regions across five countries to meet growing computing demand from customers across the globe.

The new regions, announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference, will be made available across Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa and Sweden, and will supplement new regions announced in August for New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand and Mexico. However, Google did not confirm when each of these regions would be operational.

The company has already added five new regions this year in Milan, Paris, Madrid, Columbus (Ohio, US) and Dallas, Gupta said.

The addition of the new regions will take Google’s total cloud region tally to 35 regions and 106 zones compared with 34 regions and 103 zones in August this year. Zones offer high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region, and regions are collections of zones.

As of December last year, that number stood at 29 cloud regions and 88 cloud zones globally.

Google and other major cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Oracle have been investing heavily into expanding their cloud regions.

In July, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will launch 10 new cloud regions this fiscal year.

Similarly, in June, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said the company expects to add another six regions in fiscal 2023. By July, the company had already launched two of these new sovereign regions for the European Union.

Data sovereignty adds fuel to cloud region construction

Data sovereignty regulations—rules about data that companies must keep in-country for security and privacy reasons—has given impetus to construction of cloud regions around the world. The EU has taken the lead in advancing data privacy rules with GDPR regulations, and during the Cloud Next conference, Google also announced that it was expanding its portfolio of Sovereign Solutions that can support European customers’ current and emerging sovereignty needs. 

Google Cloud Sovereign Solutions comprise Sovereign Controls, designed to help organizations manage data sovereignty requirements, as well as Supervised Cloud and Hosted Cloud options to help address operational and software sovereignty concerns. To make these controls available, Google has teamed up with a nunber of telecom companies in the EU, including T-Systems in Germany, S3NS in France, Minsait in Spain, and Telecom Italia in Italy.

Economic impact of cloud regions

Google claims that opening up new cloud regions contribute to local economic and job growth.

“These cloud regions help bring innovations from across Google closer to our customers around the globe and provide a platform that enables organizations to transform the way they do business,” Sachin Gupta, vice president of infrastructure at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

The nine new cloud regions that were announced this year are expected to collectively contribute $40 billion to global GDP by 2030 and create 314,400 jobs, a Google commissioned study by consulting firm AlphaBeta showed.

At the regional level, the three cloud regions—New Zealand, Malaysia and Thailand—announced in APAC are projected to contribute $10 billion to the region’s GDP by 2030 and create 86,500 jobs, the study showed.

Similarly, the five regions announced this year across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, are projected to contribute a cumulative $18.9 billion to EMEA’s GDP by 2030, and support creation of more than 110,500 jobs, AlphaBeta said in its report.

Cloud Computing