From Gas Stations to Burger King: Delek Group’s Unified Digital Strategy

Delek Group, founded in 1951, is no longer just an energy company. Through aggressive diversification, the Israeli giant has expanded into retail, coffee manufacturing through its Coffee Joe brand, fast food through Burger King franchises, and even entertainment venues. However, this rapid growth created a fractured IT landscape where every brand operated in a silo.

In the third episode of SAPinsider Expert Exchange Customer Experience Season 1, Kobi Yosef, Vice President of Technologies & Innovation, CIO at Delek Group, discussed how the company unified customer data to support its massive transformation.

Speaking with Robert Holland, Vice President and Research Director at SAPinsider, Yosef explained, “Delek fueling [has] its own IT system, Delek convenience stores [has] its own IT system, Coffee Joe [has] its own IT system.” Thus, to turn these disparate lines of business into a single competitive advantage, Delek needed to unify the customer experience.

Creating the Golden Record

The core of Delek’s strategy was to move away from isolated data islands to a centralized architecture. Thus, by implementing SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP), Delek created a single, coherent view of its consumers.

“SAP CDP is like the golden record of the customer for all of our entities,” Yosef said. “Whether a customer interacts via the Burger King app, the Delek fueling app, or the Coffee Joe website, the data feeds into one centralized platform.”

Additionally, to handle the complex integrations required to connect these legacy systems—including operational apps that control fuel pumps—Delek utilized the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as the integration layer.

Balancing Innovation with Trust

However, a significant hurdle was managing consent; Yosef illustrated this with an example, noting that a customer might opt in to fast-food offers but not to fuel promotions. “Delek solved this using SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC) to manage complex, brand-specific permissions under one identity,” he noted.

Yosef also emphasized that trust is built by respecting the boundary between business insights and personal privacy. “We have a wall between the operational data and the private data,” he said. “The private data is secure. It belongs to the customer.”

Architecting for the Future

Perhaps the most critical takeaway for IT leaders is Delek’s patience during the design phase. Yosef revealed that the team spent two months solely on architecture before implementation to ensure scalability. They weren’t just solving for today’s brands but were building a foundation capable of absorbing thousands of brands in the future.

“The essence of the project was to build the future,” Yosef concluded. “By unifying our digital core, Delek has successfully transformed from a traditional fuel retailer into a modern, multi-brand lifestyle conglomerate.”

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Unified identity management is essential for multi-brand compliance. A customer might agree to share data with a burger franchise but not with a fuel station, yet the business wants to recognize them as the same person across both interactions. To achieve this, Delek used SAP CDC to manage one unified identity for the user while maintaining separate consent permissions for each legal brand. This allowed the business to know its customers globally without violating privacy laws such as GDPR. For organizations managing multiple brands, this means they must not rely on simple CRM fields for consent. Implement a dedicated identity management layer, such as SAP CDC, that can handle complex, brand-specific permissions while feeding a single user profile.

Golden Record architecture must be separate from operational data. Operational systems like fuel pumps or POS are optimized for transactions, not for storing customer profiles or managing cross-platform data. However, Delek treated SAP CDP as the Golden Record, feeding it data from all touchpoints, including apps, websites, and physical stores. This shows that SAPinsiders can use SAP CDP to aggregate customer data from SAP and non-SAP sources. This serves as the single source of truth that other systems query.

Utilize an open architecture design with the SAP BTP platform as the integration system. Delek spent two months solely on architectural design before implementation. It built a centralized hub on SAP BTP to connect the legacy ERPs, new operational apps, and the CDP. This hub-and-spoke model meant that new acquisitions could be plugged into the central platform without rewriting the entire landscape. For SAPinsiders, this means resisting the urge to build direct connections for speed when planning a migration or integration. Instead, invest time in designing an SAP BTP-based integration layer that is brand agnostic, allowing the organization to scale to thousands of endpoints without refactoring the core.