Microsoft Azure helps Starbucks undergo digital transformation

Starbucks has entered into partnership with Microsoft recently to help create exceptional customer experience for the coffee chain – in the cloud and in the stores so as to craft the perfect coffee experience. The partnership with Microsoft is helping Starbucks brew up rapid innovation across its 13,000+ stores in the United States.

With the help of Microsoft, Starbucks is introducing the Starbucks Production Controller, an intelligent tool for food and beverage sequencing for mobile orders as well as in-store, so that the customers’ orders are ready real time. This timing goes a long way to ensure customer satisfaction. Improvements to capabilities such as order sequencing, product build times, labeling and routing will be enabled via this cloud-based system. This solution is powered by Azure services, including IoT Hub, Service Fabric, App Service, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Windows 10 IoT, Azure Machine Learning, Apache Spark for Azure HDInsight and Operations Management Suite (OMS). Starbucks now uses more than 50 of the company’s Azure cloud services, along with other tools such as Power BI analytics and works closely with Microsoft engineers as it plots out new initiatives.

With mobile and pay orders on the rise, another tool Starbucks is deploying in its busiest stores is the Digital Order Manager that will assist baristas in the store with the management of customer orders. Once all of the items in an order are ready for pick-up, Starbucks baristas can select the order on the Digital Order Manager screen to notify the customer that their order is ready for pickup. This uses elements of the Starbucks Production Controller system, App Service and is served on a Microsoft Surface.

Each one of these projects leverages cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, which is enabling Starbucks to move faster and build better solutions and deploy these solutions globally in the near future.