How PizzaExpress cut costs and incidents with Snowflake

The challenge

PizzaExpress were running their main reporting database on a SQL Server instance that had become a liability. It was unstable, expensive to maintain and required continual monitoring just to keep it running.

The data processes sitting underneath it were undocumented and fragmented, making them difficult to trace or maintain when something went wrong. Every incident pulled people away from work that actually mattered, and the platform had no reliable way to connect to modern API-based data sources, which was holding back new projects entirely.

IT support costs were climbing with no clear ceiling, and the data team had limited room to build the tools and reporting the business needed. The infrastructure had served its purpose, but it had reached the end of what it could reasonably do.

The solution

PizzaExpress decided to move to a fully managed cloud platform and brought Ometis in to design and build it. Snowflake was chosen as the foundation for the new data warehouse, replacing the SQL Server setup entirely.

The platform was designed with three priorities: ownership and isolation, so each data pipeline could be managed and scheduled independently without failures cascading across the system; traceability and trust, with clear naming conventions, schema alignment and lineage so the team could see exactly what was happening and why; and performance and reliability, with sequential task design and materialisation applied where it made the most difference.

Security was built in from the start, using Snowflake's network and authentication protocols and connecting to Azure Active Directory to automate user rights assignment. Custom error monitoring and alerting was integrated with Azure services, so the team could identify and respond to issues before they became outages.

"At PizzaExpress, we're trialling a few great AI use cases. Our recent migration to Snowflake has allowed us to accelerate this pursuit."

— Dan Williams, Head of Data and Business Intelligence,

The results

The combined savings on CapEx and OpEx came in at 29%, with those savings reinvested directly into further development. The data team now has more resource to build with, not less.

The reliability improvement was just as significant. P1 incidents on sales data dropped 50% compared to the same period before the migration. The business then went five consecutive months without a single incident, and completed a calendar year change without incident for the first time in eight years.

The migration has also opened up capabilities that weren't previously possible. PizzaExpress is now exploring Snowflake Cortex AI for agentic analytics, Streamlit apps for user-friendly data interfaces built directly within the platform, and data clean rooms to allow controlled data sharing with suppliers and third parties.

"PizzaExpress had outgrown their old setup, and every month they stayed on it was costing them more than it should have. The 29% cost saving is a significant result, but the incident numbers are what I'm most proud of. Five months without a single P1, and the first clean calendar year change in eight years. That tells you everything about the quality of what the team built."

Chris Lofthouse, Commercial Director at Ometis

Next steps

If your data infrastructure is costing more to maintain than it's giving back, it's worth a conversation.

We've helped businesses like PizzaExpress move off legacy systems and onto modern cloud platforms that actually scale. The difference in what their teams can do with data now compared to before is significant.

Book a call with our team to see what that could look like for you.