Mark Fabes, the former IT chief at McDonald’s UK and Starbucks EMEA, has joined health retailer Holland & Barrett as CIO.
Fabes has held senior IT positions for nearly thirty years; having been European IT manager at Converse in the 1990s, before joining now-defunct retailer Allders in 1998 for a seven-year stint as head of IT.
He then moved to the Whitbread Group, which owns brands including Costa Coffee and Premier Inn, in May 2005, where he was responsible for the development and support of a large Oracle EBS instance that operated across supply chain, finance, HR and payroll.
He then moved to McDonald’s to become its UK IT director between December 2009 and October 2015. At McDonald’s, Fabes ensured that the fast-food giant was quickest among its peers to introduce free Wi-Fi and contactless payment technology.
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He explained to Computing back in 2011 how the company was using an Oracle database with a MicroStrategy toolset for its business intelligence needs, something it stretched to all levels, from senior executives through to operational consultants in the field, to the franchisees themselves. At the time, the company also decided to use Amazon Web Services as a hosting provider for its bespoke-employee benefits scheme dubbed ‘Our Lounge’.
In 2013, Fabes suggested that 3D printing and the Internet of Things could play a part in the McDonald’s of the future – with kitchen equipment becoming part of an ‘integrated restaurant’ communicating with one another in order to balance power consumption when one appliance is using a lot of energy, and with the potential to reprint toys for Happy Meals.
In November 2015, Fabes joined Starbucks Coffee EMEA to become its vice president of technology. He was responsible for leading the technology strategy and services within the EMEA region across multiple ownership models covering 39 markets and more than 2500 stores.
He was at Starbucks for less than two years before deciding to move to Holland & Barrett, based in Nuneaton in Warwickshire.
Date: Sep 19, 2017