Digital Operating Model

CHAPTER 4DOM in Motion/Small-to-Midsize Company: Food Service Management: Whitsons Culinary Group

DOM bridges the gap—what you want versus what you need.

• Level 3 moving toward Level 4 Digital Maturity
• Culture: Customers and employees have adopted the business platform.
• Platform: Fully automated, integrated business platform ecosystem.
• Innovation: Embraced an end-to-end food management system that created the platform effect, brought in new customers, and expanded markets.

The year is 2010. Commercial food services provider Whitsons Culinary Group slowly edges toward digital. Some of its financial and customer relationship management processes and even elements of nutritional analysis utilize isolated digital solutions. But core business processes remain manual and cumbersome.

The company's various systems don't talk to each other and require a person to sign in separately to each one. Excel spreadsheets dominate tracking of farm-to-fork commodities as the company services dozens of public schools across six eastern U.S. states.

At this point Whitsons is at Level 2: Early Experiments in the digital operating model. (Plenty of companies are still there today.)

UPENDED

Then the school food services industry is upended. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 is passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama. The law mandates new and upgraded nutrition standards for school lunches.¹

Daunting Demands

Overnight, new rules apply to school lunches ...