Driving Clarity, Confidence, and Growth Through Strategic Technology Guidance

The Background

When Craveable Brands, one of Australia’s largest quick-service restaurant (QSR) groups, sought greater clarity across several strategic technology platforms, it turned to CTO Consulting for guidance. The goal was clear: align technology investments with business priorities, eliminate operational pain points, and establish a foundation for smarter, more informed decisions across critical systems, including inventory, digital marketing, and online ordering. 

Craveable Brands operates a network of iconic restaurant brands across Australia (Red Rooster, Oporto, Chicken Treat, and Chargrill Charlies), serving a customer base that increasingly expects convenience, speed, and seamless digital engagement. To keep pace, the organisation needed to modernise its technology landscape while ensuring every dollar invested delivered measurable business value. 

The Challenge 

Craveable’s leadership team faced three interconnected challenges. 

First, the company’s inventory platform required a clearer strategic direction. Store teams needed more reliable and efficient tools to manage stock, perform stocktakes, and receive goods in fast-paced, busy environments. 

Second, its marketing automation platform needed reassessment. With multiple brands and campaigns running simultaneously, Craveable needed a solution that offered stronger scalability, cost-effectiveness, and alignment with future digital marketing ambitions. 

Finally, as digital ordering became a key growth channel, the business wanted to explore low-cost, easy-to-implement drive-thru and click-and-collect solutions — all without disrupting existing operations. 

These goals demanded a structured, vendor-agnostic approach that could balance technical feasibility with business reality. Craveable also needed confidence that the proposed vendor solutions truly reflected the total cost of ownership and long-term value. 

The Approach 

CTO Consulting began by working closely with business and IT leaders across Craveable Brands to understand current pain points and aspirations. Through targeted workshops, the team gathered insights from stakeholders at every level, from store managers to executives, to build a unified view of requirements and priorities. 

For the inventory platform, CTO Consulting engaged directly with key vendors, including Oracle (IMS) and Fourth (MMX). The team assessed product roadmaps, functionality, and alignment with Craveable’s business goals. This process not only revealed immediate areas for improvement, such as mobile device enablement and better data synchronisation, but also delivered a clear action plan for future platform evolution. 

In parallel, a market scan and rapid evaluation of marketing automation platforms compared Salesforce Marketing Cloud with emerging competitors. CTO Consulting developed a comprehensive evaluation matrix that considered capability, cost and scalability. Vendors were invited to demonstrate how their solutions addressed Craveable’s specific marketing needs, ensuring a transparent and evidence-based decision-making process. 

Meanwhile, for drive-thru and click-and-collect, the team facilitated collaborative design sessions to identify a simple, low-cost, and practical solution. Two potential options were modelled in partnership with Oracle, and after detailed testing, a preferred design was validated with Craveable’s POS and eCommerce teams, paving the way for implementation in 2025. 

The Results 

The engagement delivered both immediate and strategic benefits across Craveable’s operations. 

For inventory management, the workshops brought alignment between business and IT, clarifying needs and creating a shared roadmap for improvement. 

For marketing automation, Salesforce was retained as the preferred platform, but on far more advantageous terms. The renewal not only delivered significant savings in annual licence fees and operational costs but also reduced database expansion costs and improved functionality. Over the course of three years, Craveable achieved a 20% increase in marketing cloud usage and successfully brought a fourth business unit online, supported by a reactivated Salesforce Data Cloud and new, composable data models that positioned the business for future growth. 

Finally, the drive-thru ordering solution provided a validated, low-cost design that could be implemented without disrupting operations. The chosen solution was straightforward, scalable, and fully aligned with existing store processes, a practical win that left the organisation ready for execution and future innovation. 

The Outcome 

By combining strategic insight with practical delivery, CTO Consulting gave Craveable Brands the clarity and confidence to move forward with purpose. Together, the teams transformed uncertainty into action, identifying the right solutions, validating real-world feasibility, and ensuring every investment was tied to measurable business value. 

The result: more intelligent decision-making, tangible savings, and a future-ready technology foundation that supports Craveable’s continued leadership in Australia’s fast-moving Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) sector. 

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