Shalendra Singh, CIO, Hungry Lion

It has an intimate understanding of Africa and has adapted and adjusted its technology requirements to overcome each country’s complexities and challenges and follow an aggressive expansion vision – with IT, communications and reliable energy at its core.

Headquartered in Stellenbosch, Hungry Lion is not a franchise business; each outlet is corporate owned. At the helm of its ICT strategy is Hungry Lion’s CIO, Shalendra Singh, who has received industry recognition not just for his leadership skills, but for recalibrating how to manage and grow a fast food brand into one that is data-hungry, and extremely mindful of what it takes to be an efficient, cost-effective and real-time live, data-driven service-centric organisation.

“For us, there are two focuses: product quality and speed of service,” says Singh. “There are multiple aspects to our achieving speed of service, which has come around as the result of a culmination of a number of IT projects. To meet the live data expectations, we upgraded our entire SD-WAN infrastructure and brought MTN on board to improve communications from every one of our stores across Africa.

“All this data being communicated is filtered via Google BigQuery and Looker Studio and then back into immediate staffing requirements, stock orders, patron peak times and chicken preparation cycles. We know it takes a certain amount of hours from frozen to ready, so we need to know that what we prepare will be sold, preventing waste and having enough prepared to ensure patron satisfaction in terms of freshness and acceptable waiting times. We monitor everything in the store, from order times, waiting times, seating, to payment at point of sale. We also have state-of-the-art polygon camera systems that give us immediate feedback.

“We’re getting increasingly better at establishing and following guiding principles, helping managers with just-in-time decision-making. Efficiency extends beyond daily traffic calculations, but predicting traffic on weekends, payment days and public holidays. Our emphasis on IT has helped enormously when it comes to the unpredictability in some African countries of electricity supply and thus uptime in communications – where MTN has played a proactive and vital role in helping us function.”

Singh says Hungry Lion’s expansion plans are both a micro and macroeconomic vision, which from a macro level is intended to create the jobs to help Africa become more prosperous, improve infrastructure and keep African talent on the continent.

Married to a medical doctor, with whom he shares a young son and a daughter, is what gets Singh up in the morning; he says his personal highlights are the times he spends with his family, stressing the importance of work-life balance.

His advice to up-and-coming ICT professionals in terms of building and developing their careers pivots around constantly learning, but if they want to be tech leaders, they must be cautious about accruing high levels of specialisation.

“Above all, don’t be in this industry because someone else told you to be. Be passionate, be nimble and be prepared to make and run with your decisions. Show leadership, courage and integrity,” he concludes.

everywhere you go www.mtnbusiness.co.za

For more information on how MTN Business can co-create solutions for your business, contact us on MTNBusiness.Marketing@mtn.com