Grupo Colón Gerena is a leading company in the restaurant industry in Puerto Rico, with more than 45 years of experience. Its first brand was Wendy's, later expanding with Applebee's, LongHorn, Olive Garden, and Sizzler. Today, it operates around 118 restaurants in the country.
Seven years ago, it unified its operations under a single organization, which strengthened the group's management. It is the sole operator of its brands in Puerto Rico, consolidating its position as a benchmark in the local restaurant industry.
The group adopted a comprehensive model that includes its own distribution center, a construction company for its remodeling work, and a real-estate division. This structure allows it to maintain control over every aspect of its operation, ensuring efficiency and quality across all its brands.
With this approach, Grupo Colón Gerena has consolidated its position as a leader in the restaurant industry, enabling it to offer high-quality experiences to its customers while reinforcing its long-term sustainability.
Grupo Colón Gerena faced the challenge of managing data scattered across multiple systems to generate key daily and weekly reports. This involved manual processes that took between one and two hours a day, slowing its analytical capacity.
The group had made previous attempts with solutions from other providers that failed to meet expectations, which motivated it to look for an efficient, automated alternative. IVCISA's prior experience on similar projects and its practical approach with AWS were decisive in the group selecting it as its ally.
The combination of AWS technology and IVCISA's experience allowed Grupo Colón Gerena to implement a robust, adaptable solution that transformed its data-analysis operations.
Before collaborating with IVCISA, Grupo Colón Gerena faced a significant challenge: generating key business reports depended on manual processes that consumed more time than ideal, hampering strategic analysis and delaying timely decision-making.
The dispersion of data across multiple sources complicated the creation of integrated, automatic reports. Ramón Vázquez, the group's CTO, notes: “We wanted a simple, automated way to see daily and weekly sales reports, comparing them against prior years and budgets.”
Previous attempts with other tools failed to solve the problem due to a lack of synchronization and reliability in the data. This led the team to abandon that alternative and return to manual processes.
IVCISA's experience on similar projects was key in Grupo Colón Gerena's decision to revisit the matter with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With a clear focus, IVCISA began the data-lake project with the goal of speeding up access to the information the organization's users needed and reducing the operational time spent preparing reports.
“When I saw IVCISA's references, the demo, and examples of the work they had done, I realized it was exactly what I was looking for. That gave me the comfort and confidence of knowing they had already done something similar.”
The collaboration between the group and IVCISA brought significant changes to the management and governance of its data, as well as to its reporting. One of the main achievements was the automation of daily and weekly reports, eliminating the need for manual processes, saving time, and reducing potential errors. This allowed the team to dedicate more resources to strategic analysis and well-founded decision-making.
The project implemented robust solutions based on AWS technologies. A data lake was created and a data warehouse centralized, enabling the standardization of summary tables, while Amazon QuickSight generated dynamic, customizable reports.
In this way, Grupo Colón Gerena was able to standardize the delivery of critical information. Ramón Vázquez, the group's CTO, highlights: “Having that data at the same time every day lets us see how the business is doing day to day in a reliable way.” This has had a positive impact on daily operations and responsiveness.
With the infrastructure and data already consolidated, the group is better positioned to integrate new features or additional reports as needed. This scalable approach, defined by IVCISA, ensures continuous adaptability to business demands and improved cost optimization.
“Thanks to good communication with IVCISA and the efficiency of the AWS system, we were able to complete a successful project that delivers value to the company every day.”
