Recently we successfully completed the migration of the catering system for ZKungfu, the largest Chinese fast food chain restaurant in China, which manages 200,000+ orders daily and estimates up to THREE BILLION RMB (USD 500M) transactions yearly by a Drupal-as-a-Core system.
It is one of the largest Drupal Commerce projects with such a big transition ever.
Let's deep dive to see what the project exactly is.
The case:
ZKungfu (ZKF), the largest china's Fast-food chain restaurant, have 600+ restaurants over China and manages 200,000+ orders online/offline daily. They just launched KungFu 3.1 in 2016 as the new Chinese fast food industry standard.
Sparkpad is the only authorized vendor to ZKF business.
Heikwan Cheng, owner of Sparkpad, is a genius man with really good business sense and tech background, who brings Drupal to ZKF.
Catering System includes POS(Cashier),Food Menu Management, ERP, CRM integration, and Call Center service etc. To put all into one system is not an easy task. Like most projects, technology quality and human resources are always problems, so as Drupal, here we face with below issue:
- Drupal is good, but not ever taken as very core of a business
- No. of existing Drupal developers in China are NOT ENOUGH to support such a big project
- Not many Drupal engineers has experience with high traffic and high transactions
- Drupal team is not good at handling ERP level business requirements
However, fortunately, Drupal has a strong community spirit. With years of running Drupal community in Shanghai and experience in team setup, We successfully build up the tech team with total 60 ppl, from testers to developers. Finally, it became the biggest Drupal team ever in China, 5 Seniors Drupal (5+ years), 10 middle-level Drupal(2+ years) and also PHP/NodeJs developers into a single mission oriented team.
On the other hand, a very painful point of Drupal business is -- "Dev always separate from Ops". Drupal agencies have more experience in building, while are weak at running systems. When a project becomes really core to a business and especially in a situation like China, there is no Acquia Cloud or similar product, it is really hard to persuade business to believe Drupal can run smooth & stable. We finally tackle this issue by putting Dev and Ops into one team, both of them having Drupal experiences and build the system together. This credit should give to AWS community which helps to bring in Ops talent. And also credit to Jacky Chan to take the lead in Ops, both stores and server infrastructures.
For ZKF project, the traditional Drupal project manager has no way to understand and analysis very complex business requirement in ERP level. So we found Ken Lin to the team, who have 10+ year experience in SCM/ERP also love Drupal for years, also a core member in Drupal community of Shanghai.
For next movement, we are inventing Drupal 8 into this system and integrate with more features with Sheng(Insready .inc). He will also bring a formal press release about this project to the gloabl Drupal world!
Further, thanks but not limited to guys put efforts in this project.
Drupal tech lead: Wentao Zhang
Finally about myself: Keith Yau, years in Dev and Ops, Drupalscholarship winner@2016, AWS Community hero, Shanghai Drupal UG core member. Thanks Heikwan Cheng to let me be the Principal Architect of this biggest project ever in Chinese Drupal history! And the biggest credit should give to Shanghai Drupal community, we bring most of the resources we have to make this story comes true.
Hope to get a chance to share the whole ZKF architect with you guys in Drupal Con soon :)
Drupal: the world's best PHP open source CMS !