Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Domino’s is seeing a huge increase in online sales—a critical and fiercely competitive arena for national pizza chains today—after it allowed consumers to see a real-time interactive graphic that depicts their pizza order, adding or subtracting toppings and the corresponding price adjustments. It also throws in some impressively detailed product status information, “with updates on when a pie enters the oven or leaves a store.” But the requirement of a new $20,000 POS system for each of its 5,000 franchisees and company-owned stores in the U.S. was a bit difficult to swallow.

Also, according to this well-done story in The Wall Street Journal, those new systems were apparently delivered with extra glitches. “We built a system by trying to do 1,000 things, but 500 of them didn’t work. We had a real crisis of quality,” Domino’s CIO Christ McGlothlin said. “We had to make sure the 20 basic things the system needed to do would work, so the first year all we focused on was getting those basic things working flawlessly.” An example of an early problem: “One franchisee had organized delivery maps in a way that didn’t work with other franchisees’ maps. Another franchisee sorted his employee time sheets in a way that wasn’t compatible with the rest of the system.” All in all, it’s an interesting read.