How Grupo AFAL Cut Internal Software Development Costs by 85% Across 100+ Carl's Jr. Restaurants Using SmartSuite
The Challenge
Grupo AFAL operates 100+ Carl's Jr. restaurants across Northwestern Mexico and owns three proprietary brands: Cypress, Sal de Jade, and Café 57. As Director of Digital Transformation, Federico G. had accumulated a backlog of 70 internal project requirements — dashboards, workflow tools, training automations, and operational tracking systems requested by stakeholders across the business. The existing approach relied on Oracle APEX custom development with C# applications, which cost $10,000–$20,000 per project and took 3–6 months to deliver. At that rate, clearing the 70-project backlog would have taken over a decade. The cost and timeline made digital transformation a staged, incremental process that couldn't keep pace with the speed at which the business was generating new requirements. Internal stakeholders had legitimate operational needs that remained unaddressed for years because the economics of custom development made them unfeasible.
The Solution
Grupo AFAL adopted SmartSuite as a low-code operational platform, working with low-code development consultants to build internal solutions at a fraction of the previous cost. Project management dashboards were built to track digitisation plans, payments, bug reports, and testing across the restaurant network. Workflow automations were created for training requests and employee onboarding. Solutions were developed incrementally without the extensive upfront planning and design documentation that custom development required — reducing the overhead of each delivery cycle and enabling faster iteration in response to stakeholder feedback. Multiple internal business units were served through the same platform rather than through separate, purpose-built applications.
The Outcome
Monthly software development costs fell by 85%. The cost per internal solution dropped from $10,000–$20,000 down to approximately $3,000 — making previously uneconomical projects viable. Hundreds of hours of manual coding effort were eliminated across delivery cycles. Design documentation requirements simplified substantially: what had required lengthy upfront specification could now be built and iterated directly in the platform. The 70-project backlog that had previously represented a decade's worth of work became addressable within a realistic delivery timeline. Internal stakeholders who had waited years for tooling received working solutions on a schedule measured in weeks rather than quarters.
Strategic Takeaway
Grupo AFAL's case illustrates a dynamic common in multi-unit restaurant and franchise operations: the gap between the volume of internal digital requirements and the economics of custom development. When each internal tool costs $10,000–$20,000 and takes months to deliver, most requirements simply don't get built — they accumulate in a backlog that grows faster than it's cleared. The 85% cost reduction is significant in absolute terms, but the more important shift is structural: SmartSuite changes the feasibility threshold for internal tooling from "large projects only" to "anything with a credible business case." At $3,000 per solution, the firm can respond to operational needs as they arise rather than rationing development capacity for the highest-stakes requirements.
- In multi-unit operations, the real cost of digital transformation is not the price of software — it is the accumulated cost of all the internal tools that never get built because custom development economics make them unviable.
- An 85% cost reduction per solution changes who gets to make requests: at $10,000 per project, only high-priority needs get addressed; at $3,000, operational teams can get tooling that improves their daily work without executive-level justification.
- Low-code platforms shift the bottleneck in internal software delivery from development cost to requirement clarity — the limiting factor becomes knowing what you want to build, not whether you can afford to build it.
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