Edo Japan is a leading Canadian quick service restaurant (QSR) brand with a strong national presence. Known for its signature hot Teppanyaki-style meals, Edo delivers fresh, affordable, and delicious Japanese-inspired cuisine in a fast paced dining format. With over 200 locations across Canada and a recent expansion into the USA, Edo continues to grow while maintaining a strong focus on customer experience and operational excellence.
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Edo Japan had invested in an existing data warehouse to support its analytics needs, but as the business evolved, several critical limitations emerged:
Technical Debt & Complexity: The existing architecture included legacy components which introduced unnecessary complexity and technical debt. This made even minor enhancements costly and difficult.
Difficulty Getting QSR Insights: Edo Japan was limited in the insights it was getting out of its warehouse, which led to low adoption and teams working around the warehouse instead of from it.
No Path to AI: Without the foundation in place for analytics, Edo Japan wasn’t ready to begin thinking about using its rich data for more advanced analytics use cases and AI.
These challenges meant Edo was not able to unlock the full strategic potential of its data.
The Challenge
To modernize its data capabilities, Edo Japan partnered with Data SEA Consulting to stand up a new data platform. This solution redefined Edo’s approach to data:
Transparent & Reliable Pipelines: Data pipelines were rebuilt from the ground up to ensure visibility, traceability, and dependability - complete with lineage and metadata to support governance and change management.
QSR Data Enrichment: External data such as weather data brought context to sales KPIs at 4 intervals throughout the day, enabling Edo Japan to understand at a per-store basis, how weather impacted top line sales, sales types trends (delivery, in-store, take-out) and product mix.
Built for AI: The new lakehouse is designed not only to support today’s reporting needs but to serve as a foundation for more advanced initiatives like automation (operational data pipelines) and AI (both classic ML and agentic AI).
The Solution
The Results
The transformation delivered immediate and long-term value:
A Reliable, Transparent Platform: The lakehouse now ingests data from 12 distinct sources (both internal and third-party) on a daily schedule, with data quality checks in place before structuring this data in a way that abstracts nuances from the source systems and instead reflects Edo Japan’s business.
New Insights and Automation: Clean, modeled data drastically reduced the time required to develop dashboards and extract insights, enabling more agile decision-making. Manual processes to report on Same Restaurant Sales (SRS) or product roll-ups were automated in the lakehouse and enable teams to build off the lakehouse, not work around it.
Platform for AI: With trusted data in place, Edo has begun enriching its data with metadata and context about its business, enabling it to successfully build AI use cases with its data both quickly and effectively. In less than 1 week, Edo Japan was able to use its cleaned up data with an AI chat bot model to get accurate results to business questions.
This new platform has positioned Edo to make data a true competitive advantage across the organization.
“Data SEA took the time to understand our data challenges—especially the complexity and technical debt that were holding us back. They came in with a clear, organized project plan and executed it flawlessly. Every milestone was hit on time, and the entire engagement was well-managed from kickoff to deployment.
What really sets Data SEA apart, though, is their leadership in the AI space. They didn’t just rebuild our data platform—they built it with a vision. The new lakehouse architecture isn’t just reliable and scalable; it’s also positioned us to start pursuing AI opportunities that were previously out of reach. We’re already seeing early use cases come to life, and it’s created real excitement across our teams about what’s next.
If you’re looking for a partner who combines deep technical knowledge, strong business understanding, and true AI thought leadership, Data SEA is that partner.”
Matt Pessanha
Director of IT & Digital