As Steel Authority of India Limited's Rourkela steel plant started cranking up its best ever production numbers in the summer of 2012, a bespectacled Kashmiri executive revisited his hometown and amid memories and memos, inaugurated the firstever Domino's pizza store in the steel city. Eight years in the top job as CEO of Jubilant FoodWorks, Ajay Kaul is anything but a corner office stereotype. Before opening the store last April, decked up in the trademark blue-andblack Domino's tee-cap-cargo combo, he essayed the role of an SDP to perfection. The acronym is a homegrown term for Safe Delivery Persons, or the delivery boys, who zip from door to door with boxes they call 'warm bags'. And the prefix 'Safe' conforms to the speed governor attached to every bike that maintains a maximum speed limit of 40 kilometres/hour.But Kaul had a different calling. Along with the local team, he rode a D o m i n o ' s -branded Hero bike into every possible direction with the store as the locus. They rode for 8-9 minutes in each direction and returned to the store. He defines that time-bound journey the "lakshman rekha" for any SDP. That is, the Domino's delivery boys will strictly toe the line and not serve houses that take more than 8-9 minutes to reach from the store.Here's why. Domino's pizza comes with a 30-minute guarantee from the time an order is placed. If the time taken to deliver the pizza is more than 30 minutes, the pie comes free if it costs under Rs 300. And in case it costs more than that amount, the company subtracts Rs 300 from the bill. In case it is more than 4 pizzas, it is regarded as a bulk order and the guarantee does not apply. So by and large, all processes at Domino's are geared to meet the 30-minute deadline.When a customer calls, the order is flashed on the kitchen screen. The pizza maker looks at it and gets down to the job at hand. There is the obvious dough stretching, saucing and cheesing, and depending on the nature of the order, 'itemizing' or topping, before it goes into the oven. Baking takes 6 minutes from where it goes to the cut table. Finally, it lands up on the routing table where it is packed as per order in pizza delivery boxes (read: warm bags) that SDPs carry to the last mile. "On average, we deploy 6-7 people on the process depending on the store size," says Harneet Singh Rajpal, VP-Marketing, Domino's Pizza India.So this is how the 30 minutes divvy up. From order to oven, it should not take more than 4 minutes. Since the oven takes six minutes to bake; cutting, packing and pick-up make up for, say, another five minutes. And delivery time should never exceed eight minutes. Add all that-it's a neat 23 minutes. "We're designed to deliver in 23 minutes and give a seven minute buffer to our employees for unforeseen traffic, rains etc.," says Rajpal. The 50-year-old Kaul's calling is thus justified.With 20,000 employees across 552 stores spanning 118 cities, the process is performed de rigueur day in and out. But the story doesn't end there. In the backend, materials need to move from the 180-odd business partners or vendors to the four factories or 'commissaries' as they are called inhouse, before landing up at the stores. This is where each ingredient in the supply chain comes under sharp scrutiny.Kaul signed up with Domino's Pizza some eight years ago but even then, pizzas as a category hadn't quite caught the fancy of the average diner. "The ecosystem did not exist and there was no mozzarella or sauce supplier and we had to import everything initially," he points out, adding that today 100% of the procurement is localised.Elaborating on the chain, Harsharan Marwah, Sr.VP-Supply Chain, Jubilant FoodWorks Limited, claims that all goods in the system need to necessarily move between 1 and 4 degree Celsius. "There are 80-90 frozen trucks dedicated to us countrywide," he says. The first step is aligning vendors to the Domino's way. Company executives visit each vendor regularly and Kaul emphasizes that they have to be in sync with the vision of the company for the next five years. In the process, some of the vendors are literally hand-held by Domino's in their growth curve.Take the case of the Chandigarh-based Chattha Foods. They broke into the scene 3-4 years ago supplying chicken to Domino's. Prior to them, Venky's was the sole supplier of chicken toppings to the pizza giant until constraints on supplies prompted Domino's to add Chattha Foods to their list of suppliers. Today, about 60-70% of their produce is picked up by Domino's. Again, the Manesar-based Ample Food is the sole supplier of pepperoni to Domino's. From Rs 5 crore in revenues in 2008-09, it has clocked Rs 20 crore in 2012-13.Kaul insists that 80% of his vendors are HACCP-certified and that in the next 6 months, all 180 vendors would receive the certification. Again, once a quarter, there are random unannounced audits and vendors must keep complying to be on the supply map. So cheese, poultry, lamb, pepperoni, sauces, canned veggies and condiments, dips and a bevy of choices move from vendor factories to the four Domino's factories or commissaries in Noida, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore.Typically, each commissary covers 30,000-40,000 sq.ft. of area with 45-50 people. This is also where Domino's makes its proprietary dough from the flour that comes in. It's like the Coke formula-they'll die but never divulge! Essentially, there are two divisions in a commissary-dry and cold warehouse. Dry ingredients land up on the dry side but most action is now centered in the cold warehouse, which further has twin buckets-a -18 degree Celsius store for the dough and a 1-4 degree Celsius store for most other ingredients.From here, the ingredients are loaded on to frozen trucks, which maintain the 1-4 degree Celsius temperature band, and taken to the stores. "Each truck is enabled with GPS trackers, which enables our area logistics managers to access the temperature status in any of these vehicles," says Marwah.Tracking is essential since offloading ingredients from the frozen trucks needs to be done in 30 minutes flat as after that, the temperature rises to 5 degree Celsius. This is how the backend complements the frontend that practically gets the dough rolling.Today, all that activity translates into 70-80 lakh pizzas a month for Domino's. The master franchise for Domino's Pizzas in the Indian subcontinent rests with Jubilant FoodWorks Limited and its network of 552 stores does twice the orders booked across the US. In fact, the top 10 stores in the world by the number of pizzas sold in a year are from India-and they're all from Domino's.As many as five of them are from Delhi NCR and sitting at the third store by way of ranking at Noida's bustling Sector 18 market, at least for as while, the footfalls seem to fly. "We churn out 3.74 lakh pizzas a year and in December, we did ` 70 lakh worth of sales," says the very peppy store manager of the Sector 18 store, K Kashi. Roughly, the 2,200 sq.ft. store logs in 12,000 footfalls a month!Bottomline, the system is designed to deliver in 30 minutes with a 99.6% success rate that Kaul tracks religiously every day. With revenues at Rs 1,017 crore (FY 2011-12) and EBITDA margins at 18.7%, the dough for sure is rising. About 50% of the revenues come from casual dining and takeaway and delivery makes up the remaining half. Though online ordering was launched just two years ago, it accounts for 15% of the delivery revenue pie. And despite launching mobile applications about four months back, they contribute to 2% of the delivery revenues and about 10% of the online sales. "We have more than 5 lakh apps downloaded and are among the top players in m-commerce countrywide," says Rajpal.Sunil Jasuja, CEO of Levitate Mobile Technologies, got into a business partnership with Domino's a year back and developed their mobile ordering platform which is fully integrated to their backend. "The accuracy of ordering has increased with m-commerce because you are seeing what you are ordering instead of talking to someone over the phone who just may make a mistake," says Jasuja.Sure, the supply chain complements delivery in every aspect of technology and so do the range of annual offerings in Domino's stores. Twice a year, about 10-12 people huddle in a room for a day-long exercise they call 'customer to customer'. Basically, the exercise is an internal brainstorming to gauge what products will work for customers. And typically, the group comprises people from marketing, the operations team and the NPD (New Product Development) team.Rajpal attended such a meeting 6 months back where the group thrashed out some 50 ideas. "We have to launch pizzas and sides and need such blue sky sessions where we don't have any blocks," says Rajpal. So the ' C h e e s y Boloroni Pizza' launched in November last was a result of that blue sky session. Rajpal explains that since Domino's launched pastas three years ago and already has a 'Cheese Burst Pizza', wherein liquid cheese is filled into the pizza, they decided to combine the two. The result: Macaroni and Bolognese sauce stuffed inside the crust with bar-be-cue flavoured liquid cheese and mozzarella as toppings.Clearly, on product strategy, the key driver is the novelty factor of the product. So products not doing too well are taken off the menu since there is limited space on shelves. For instance, Domino's launched calzone in 2007 which was discarded in 2009; it got in a pizza with Chinese ingredients as topping only last year and decided to pull it off the shelves as it did with one '3 Cheese Pizza'.With 3-4 new offerings being launched every year, it becomes even more critical for the 4-member NPD team to work closely with the vendors detailing size, storage and smooth passage. Overall, in linking up the chain, CEO Kaul has been on the ball as Domino's notched up a 62% share in the organized pizza market and 70% share in the pizza delivery segment countrywide. Besides, over the last 5 years, the pizzamaker has registered a 48% CAGR that makes it the largest quick service restaurant network in the country, clearly drawing the 'lakshman rekha' for the competition.About 3-4 years ago, Sandeep Mittal, Managing Director of Cartesian Consulting, met up with the then Marketing head of Domino’s India Dev Amritesh, who’s now looking after the Marketing activities of licensee Jubilant FoodWorks Limited’s other brand Dunkin’ Donuts. Amritesh was particularly drawn in by the Cartesian Consulting tagline—Precision Marketing. That’s because there exists an in-house designation at Domino’s India which goes by the name ‘Precision Marketing Manager’. Ever since, Cartesian has stuck around as the pizza-maker’s data custodian. “In India, it is difficult to pinpoint customer profiles and so we relied heavily on billing data and campaign response to segment customer types,” says Mittal. For tyros, billing data would reflect things like what the customer orders, the type of orders, the time of ordering etc. And campaign response takes care of how consumers use coupons, whether they actually go through emails and how they respond to them, so on and so forth. Based on such “exhaustive” information, Cartesian helped Domino’s identify 12 customer types: Couponos (Order with coupon only)Grandos (Large size pizzas)Loyalos (Order same pizza type every time)Partios (Sometimes party size orders)Nostalgios (Haven't come for a while)Nightos (Order at night)Revisitos (Come back after a break)Relaxios (Weekends)Randomos (Unpredictable)Varitios (Try a wide range of things)Starios (Best customers) Pamparios (Needs indulgence, responds to offers)