Case Study · Checkmate — Integrations Organization

One architecture, five national brands, 6,000+ locations

One of America's largest restaurant groups needed its whole portfolio — five national brands on four different POS platforms — onboarded to delivery channels through one repeatable pipeline, not five bespoke projects.

5 national brands, one architecture
6,000+ locations live
3,000+ locations in the largest single launch in company history

Context

From 2021, the integrations organization took on the portfolio of one of America's largest restaurant groups: a sandwich chain, a drive-in classic, a coffee-and-donuts giant, its wings-and-sports-bar sister brand, and more — spread across Brink, Oracle Simphony, NCR Aloha, and a custom digital layer. I co-built the enterprise pipeline that made this a single engineering problem instead of five.

Challenge

Every brand had its own POS platform, menu structure, and rollout politics — but the group expected portfolio-wide consistency: the same onboarding experience, the same limited-time-offer (LTO) mechanics, the same reliability. Menu changes had to propagate across thousands of stores at once, and the early infrastructure showed its limits when brand-wide LTO runs stretched to nine hours.

Approach

  • Built the multi-brand enterprise menu pipeline: bulk menu ingestion, brand-specific POS mapping, batch imports, and coordinated LTO runs across thousands of locations in a single pass.
  • Identified the database bottleneck behind the nine-hour LTO runs and drove the RDS infrastructure upgrade that enabled concurrent multi-brand runs at significantly reduced processing times.
  • Spearheaded the Bulk Scheduler — the internal tool the operations team uses daily to run brand-wide menu changes, coordinating runs of up to 2,200+ locations at a time across three national brands.
  • Sequenced the launches: the 3,000+ location sandwich chain on Brink — the largest launch in company history — a 1,000-store conversion for the drive-in brand on its custom digital layer, then the coffee-and-donuts giant (Oracle Simphony) and its wings sister brand (NCR Aloha).

Key decisions

  • One pipeline, brand-specific mapping at the edges — the architecture absorbed POS differences in the mapping layer, so every new brand strengthened shared infrastructure instead of forking it.
  • Fix the platform before the next launch, not after — the RDS upgrade was scheduled off the back of LTO pain, so the record-setting launches landed on infrastructure that could hold them.
  • First-party too — the same architecture powers the group's first-party delivery channels alongside the third-party marketplaces, doubling the return on every pipeline improvement.

Outcomes

Five national brands live through one architecture, 6,000+ locations on delivery channels, the largest launch in company history delivered without a rebuild, and menu-change infrastructure the operations team still runs daily.

← All case studies