Customer proof on record
How Zippys cut product selection time in half with Olive
- Customer on record
- Zippys
- Vendor on record
- Olive
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Proofmap summary
Proofmap writes this summary with AI from the quotes the contributor approved for this proof and the recorded conversation they come from. It is distilled from the approved material only, not from anything else about the company, and it is not a review or a rating.Created with AI, distilled from the approved quotes
Zippys uses Olive's "centralized marketplace" for digital RFPs and says the platform is "cutting our time in half" from product selection to review. By its Vice President Information Technology's account, the system provides an "easier way to collaborate" that eliminates "time-consuming emails and file transfers." Anthony Mejia notes this "massive time and stress reducer" helps the company find a smaller player that "checked more of our boxes."
Approved quotes
Every quote the contributor approved, in the wording approved, so a cited quote can be checked against this proof.
Showing all 25 quotes
- Background
Self Intro
“Hi, my name is Anthony Mejia from Zippy's restaurants. I'm the vice president of Technology. I've been in the restaurant industry for about 25 years now with brands like BJ's, Lazy Dog, and Pieology. I live in Orange County, California, but our restaurants are based in Hawaii and the Las Vegas Valley.”
- How they use it
Accelerated Product Selection
“I consider Olive kind of like online dating. It really helps you put your list of requirements against theirs and matches you quickly. Before Olive, product selection was very much like normal dating before the internet. You had to rely on word of mouth, call your friends, and ask what they were using. Even then, you still had to figure out if that product was the right fit for your specific requirements. Olive has really accelerated that process. Now it's just looking at the things I need versus the things they offer. If it looks like a really good fit, we get on the phone and start getting right into the details.”
- How they use it
Discovering New Vendors
“The digital RFP side of things that Olive offers is great. Before, it was so challenging to find products when you just knew you needed something different but didn't fully know what you wanted. Now you just get to look in the system and see that instead of the three or four major players you thought existed in a particular competency, there are actually 10 or 15. All of a sudden, the conversation grows and you realize you should look at some of these other products to see if they fill needs you didn't even know you had.”
- Results
Uncovering Hidden Requirements
“When you look into Olive, you start to see features a product has that might touch on a problem you didn't even know you had. It might not have been at the forefront, but they call it out and you realize it's something you need to consider for this engagement. Now I make sure that's a priority because I see the product not only solves the things I thought I cared about, but also other things I didn't think it would solve. I'm getting a two birds with one stone kind of experience.”
- Advice
Evaluating Vendor Partnerships
“I still want to go out and say, now that I know this product aligns with my business needs, I want to know if they are going to be a good partner. You need someone who is available and easy to work with because you're going to have quite a relationship with them. It doesn't just come down to what's black and white on paper; the relationship side still matters. Once I determine the product I want to use, I still go back to the people using it and ask if they actually like the relationship they have with that team and if they are easy to work with.”
- How they use it
Cross-Department Collaboration
“To really put a final touch on a project, you require many executives who will have an impact on it. If I'm putting out a new point of sale, I need to make sure operations, marketing, finance, and purchasing all have their needs met. There are a lot of departments involved. Now, I'm given a centralized workspace within the Olive ecosystem where I can just share our requirements with everybody else in the group. They can look at it, check their boxes, and fill in their requirements. It's just an easier way to collaborate on the effort, whereas before it was more of a scavenger hunt trying to piecemeal everything together.”
- Results
Centralized Vendor Marketplace
“It's a centralized marketplace, no different than the app store or Google Store for your phone where everything is in one place. That's how Olive is for larger business applications. I just have everybody go there, look at it, and agree to it together. I'm not sending emails, forwarding, or sharing documents. We all go look right in the tool, see the requirements we want to put in and what the vendors come back with. It allows us to have quicker meetings that get us to a resolution faster. I've noticed that since working with Olive, products ramp up and launch much quicker because a lot of that initial soul-searching is shortened.”
- Advice
Software Implementation Strategy
“With previous products, you obviously need to make sure you have all the integrations in the new product that the old one had, plus any new ones it couldn't support. You also want to make sure you're getting out of your contract to make that transition. Then you go through the departments to ensure everybody aligns on their business needs so the product is ready for launch. From there, you put together a timeline for configuration and lab testing. We usually get it into one location to do A/B testing against our previous product to stress test it. Once it works in one location, maybe you go to three, and then come up with a rollout plan for the rest of the organization, prioritizing locations with higher volume or bigger problems.”
- How they use it
Olive's Role in Procurement
“That's spot on. We save about half the time from the planning phase to the review of potential vendors. Once you've made your product selection, Olive's effort really ends there, and the launch process is based on what we were already doing in the past. It's not a deterrent; it's just that another tool is probably needed for the actual launch and rollout.”
- Results
Cutting Evaluation Time in Half
“In the early phases, from product selection to product review, we're cutting our time in half from where it used to be with the implementation of Olive. It's cutting out a lot of the mistakes we were making before and eliminating time-consuming emails and file transfers. The centralized review of the product has really ramped up our time to market.”
- Advice
Importance of Vendor Data Accuracy
“What's most important is that the vendors in the marketplace do a really good job of making sure they check all their different boxes within the system. That way, when I go in and check my boxes, we make sure we line up. Sometimes we find out a vendor hasn't done as detailed of a job as they needed to out of the gate, and a vendor that was actually the right choice doesn't come to the forefront. It's really important that both parties put in as much information as possible to get the best match, so once we get together, things go very smoothly.”
- How they use it
Reducing Vendor Introductions
“I would say we have fewer introductions now. Before, if you were doing a POS implementation, you might talk to six or seven different vendors and go through hours of product review before determining they weren't the right fit. The time savings on those introductions is great. I get down to one or two key players that best fit my business needs, and I get to skip some of the initial handshaking with so many different partners. It really is a massive time and stress reducer for us.”
- Results
Overcoming Vendor Bias
“When we were trying to choose a loyalty partner about three years ago, we came in with predisposed choices. We thought it was going to be vendor A or B, but it wound up being C. When we started to dig in, we realized the top vendors didn't meet our API needs or have a separate gift card component, but option C did. I came in with assumptions, but going through the process in Olive showed us we weren't as compatible with the two top players as we thought. Going with the third option has worked out great.”
- Results
Finding the Right Vendor Fit
“We recently did an RFP for a loyalty program and were looking at two top players. We wound up not choosing either of them, instead choosing a smaller player that checked more of our boxes. We would have never even known that if we hadn't gone through Olive to find that they met specific requirements where the larger vendors did not.”
- Results
Time and Cost Savings
“Time is money. There's always cost savings, whether it's actual product costs or just time, and time is the biggest thing Olive has saved for us. There are also potential cost savings from avoiding choosing the wrong product and having to pull back later. We probably don't even recognize all the savings, but we definitely recognize the massive reduction in the time commitment required to choose the right partner.”
- Results
Shared Vendor Accountability
“You're putting a lot of trust in the information being displayed to you. If a vendor isn't honest about checking the boxes that apply to them, I can go back into the system and flag that they didn't deliver. That's the other great part. I can provide feedback to other people looking into that RFP, saving them from the heartache I might have gone through by warning them away from a bad partner.”
- How they use it
Streamlining Executive Reviews
“When looking at a new product, it used to start with a one-on-one meeting with the vendor just to test the waters. If it was good, I'd expand to a larger group, and if they liked it, we'd have a third meeting with the entire executive team. Olive cuts through all of that. Now I flip the process and ask the executives to go through the platform with me and check all the boxes that are important to them right at the beginning. We skip so many meetings along the way because I already know what they want, and it's all baked into the product.”
- How they use it
Eliminating Repetitive Vendor Pitches
“I don't think anybody likes repeating the same thing over and over again. Vendors come to the meeting with their slide deck, walk through the steps, and probably skip important parts because the process becomes monotonous for them. That means I don't get everything out of it and walk away with extra questions. I wouldn't have those gaps if we just used a digital RFP like Olive.”
- Results
Crowdsourced Vendor Evaluations
“The word-of-mouth process still happens; people still ask me for recommendations. Now, instead of just telling them to go with a specific vendor, I point them to Olive. I tell them we went with a certain player, but they can use this community to compare options and figure out what's right for them while skipping a lot of steps. I wind up recommending Olive by telling peers not to just take my opinion, but to use a marketplace that's been crowdsourced by many others to find out what's truly best for their needs.”
- Advice
Limitations of Word of Mouth
“There are so many variables between businesses. One might be full service while we are quick service, or publicly traded versus privately owned. Because of those variables, someone's word-of-mouth recommendation really only tells you if the product is stable and if the partner is easy to deal with. Beyond that, I still have to go through the due diligence myself to make sure the solution is actually right for my specific brand.”
- How they use it
Validating Vendor Reputation
“I go in with my requirements first to find out which vendors are the most popular matches. Then I dig deeper to see what other people are saying about them before I get too invested. I want to make sure others feel comfortable with them from the same standpoints I care about, ensuring they are a flexible and responsive partner I can actually work with.”
- Results
Leveling the Vendor Playing Field
“You're seeing smaller players have a better shot now. Obviously, the large players have more marketing dollars behind them to drive product awareness. But as more of the restaurant business goes through Olive, buyers start to see past that. They realize there are better options out there beyond just the biggest names. I might find a smaller product that is actually better than the legacy systems, which I wouldn't have known about otherwise because I had no exposure to it.”
- Results
De-risking Vendor Selection
“I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies in the past, and they're not prone to taking chances. They want to go with a known quantity. It's hard to know if a product truly works well behind the scenes just by seeing it operate in another restaurant once. You don't know if the vendors are actually cooperative. But the information in Olive airs the dirty laundry so I can see what's real and what's not. All of a sudden, a smaller product gets a chance because there are candid, verified opinions being shared within the Olive ecosystem that reduce the risk of trying someone new.”
- Advice
AI Accelerating Internal Development
“If I built a homegrown product in the old days, it might be very hard to maintain. But now, I can just ask agentic AI to rewrite the code to modernize it—like moving from C++ to React—so it can interface with another product. That modernization can happen in days or weeks now, whereas it used to take months or even years.”
- Results
Olive as a Strong Partner
“It's really important to have strong partners. You want someone you can get along with, but at the end of the day, they have to be really good at their job. Olive has put out a great ecosystem that continues to evolve. They are always there when I have questions or need something modified on their system. They're very quick to resolve issues and have been a really great partner.”