(US & Canada) VIDEO | Data Accuracy Validates Data Trust – The Wendy’s Company Data Management and Analytics VP

Wendi Eriksen, VP of Data Management and Analytics at The Wendy’s Company, speaks with PJ Weidner, District Sales Manager at Pure Storage, in a video interview about leveraging predictive analytics to improve customer experience, data quality and governance, and leveraging AI and ML to accelerate analytics.

At the outset, Eriksen mentions that her successful journey has come down to combining her ambition with a fair amount of chance and favorable timing. Through working with several Fortune 500 companies, she has had the opportunity to learn from both good and bad leaders.

From leading one of the world's largest HR transformations to starting a data science and innovation organization, and growing from 1 to 300 people, Eriksen has experienced it all. She reveals that Wendy’s plans on leveraging analytics to improve customer experience in multiple ways. One of them is predictive analytics. Her team uses predictive analytics to identify potential trade areas, sales trends, customer demand, and propensity to purchase products, and anticipate future possibilities.

This allows optimization of relevant offers, promotions, staffing levels, and inventory management to ensure that the right products are in the right locations, says Eriksen. The company tries to avoid any shortages of supplies.

Moving forward, Eriksen emphasizes that data quality and data governance are critical parts of her work. She states that if the business does not trust the data, it will not use it, and to build confidence in the data, there must be solid data quality and data governance programs in place. Explaining further, she states that data quality and governance should not be seen as separate items. She considers implementing integrated data solutions and bringing that data into a seamless integration to create a single unified view of the data.

However, Eriksen maintains that the self-service data silos happen because business partners cannot get access to the data or do not trust it. She insists that the accuracy and completeness of the data are paramount, as they give the business the validity to trust the data.

Providing businesses with curated views of data and data quality metrics, metadata, and data lineage will create a single source of truth they can trust. This will help prevent the building of data silos caused by business partners distrusting the data.

Furthermore, Eriksen discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) play significant roles in automating tasks, enhancing decision-making, and developing new products and services. She asserts that Wendy's leverages both technologies to improve data science models and data quality, and accelerate analytics.

Wendys and Google recently announced the expansion of their partnership to include a Voice AI drive-through pilot. This pilot utilizes Google's generative AI and language model technology built upon data which paves the way for the restaurant of the future.

Eriksen states that the massive risk Wendy's faces is its ability to customize items on the menu. As such, the challenge becomes understanding the language associated with each customization to ensure accuracy.

In continuation, she affirms that the company is undertaking efforts to ensure the applications are cloud-native and cloud-capable. It evaluates cost drivers to deploy tiered storage layers, uses budget adherence, and capping overages for auto-scaling. Additionally, the company governs its cloud environment to eliminate any inefficiencies and ensure proper tagging.

Eriksen promotes the idea that data is holistic, and not siloed. With AI and ML simplifying day-to-day tasks and helping with improved decision-making, new products and services will come out. She argues that the rapid expansion of IoT will rapidly expand organizational ability.

Concluding, she states that the ability to collect and exchange data from sensors in restaurants is going to be a game changer for Wendy’s and other companies as well.

CDO magazine appreciates Wendi Eriksen for sharing invaluable insights with our global community.