Hooters of America, LLC is the operator and franchisor of over 300 Hooters restaurants in 42 states and 27 different countries. As Chief Information Officer, Mr. Caplan and his team are responsible for defining and implementing technology strategy for Hooters' 195 corporate-owned stores and the technical agenda for all stores within the brand. Since joining the company in 2022 to spearhead Hooters' digital transformation, Mr. Caplan has led Hooters' migration to a new point-of-sale system, migration to a new restaurant management platform, and the upgrade of networks at all store locations. He led the implementation of new cyber technologies and cyber policies to ensure the brand exceeds standards for the industry. He has also driven significant improvements in Hooters' online ordering architecture that have resulted in reduced outages. Much of this work has been done through unique "win-win" vendor partnerships that Mr. Caplan has brought to the business.Mr. Caplan's responsibilities have extended beyond the technology space to provide broad business impact. For example, Mr. Caplan built the business case for a redesign and reemphasis of Hooters' loyalty program and is now supervising the transition. Mr. Caplan also introduced new prioritization and planning methodologies across the enterprise that unlocked the delivery of important new business capabilities. Finally, Mr. Caplan has greatly evolved Hooters' payment card portfolio to take advantage of industry opportunities.

Systems Evolution, Inc. (SEI) is a boutique business and technology consulting firm focused on delivering superior value to local clients since 1992. The company provides the agility, consistency, and personal attention of a local partner while offering the reach and knowledge assets of a national organization. They support critical client needs in the areas of: Project Planning and Execution, Technology Planning and Deployment, Business Process Optimization, and Enterprise Information Management.Examples of Mr. Caplan's work include the following:* Program Director for the development of a new, omnichannel payment processing gateway for one of the world's largest financial technology providers. Mr. Caplan's responsibilities included coordinating feature development across more than a dozen teams, leading merchant implementations on the new platform, and retiring legacy gateways. The delivery scope included digital (card not present), point-of-sale, and value-added offerings.* Program Manager for the creation of a new omnichannel product catalog and digital shopping experience for a leading multinational retailer. Mr. Caplan also directed the development of a customer data lake that unlocked new customer-merchant relationship opportunities for merchandising and service.* Delivery Leader for the development and implementation of a new mortgage customer communication system for one of North America's largest mortgage servicers. Mr. Caplan coordinated delivery work among a 150-person development team that crossed three continents.In addition to providing delivery services, Mr. Caplan also fulfilled chief-of-staff responsibilities for senior technology or business leaders during each of his engagement. He also provided timeline and impactful executive-level reporting, defined organizational strategies, led portfolio management/PMO activities, and provided leadership coaching.

Mr. Caplan was hired to transform internal business technology support groups into high performing teams. His responsibilities included the following: definition of service offerings, definition of organization structure, development of roadmaps, leadership of the projects and programs conducted by the collective teams, development and management of relationships with key vendors, and overall team leadership. Mr. Caplan directed a 50+ person team on the following initiatives:Mr. Caplan defined, built and staffed proactive Tier I and Tier II application support organizations that delivered end user services for internal and external users, resulting in a defect backlog reduction of over 55%. In an accompanying project, Mr. Caplan applied aggressive sourcing and vendor management techniques to reduce desktop support operational costs by 40% while significantly improving customer satisfaction. Mr. Caplan also program managed corporate-wide desktop upgrades, implemented a bring-your-own-device user option, implementation of desktop virtualization, and deployed sales force automation. Finally, to improve the end user experience and visibility to tickets and work queues, Mr. Caplan and team deployed a new IT service management platform (Service Now) to 2,000 users within a 30 day window. This ultimately led to service level attainment rate improvements of 50%.Via a series of remediation projects, availability of the company’s Cisco Call Center (UCCE) environment was increased from 99.9% to 99.999%. Mr. Caplan and his team also migrated a 600-person sales organization to a cloud-based PBX system within a 75-day window.Mr. Caplan created and led the business operations function for a 400-person customer care organization. He established metrics, controls, and reporting standards that better aligned technology and business functions while improving end user communications. Mr. Caplan also led joint IT/internal audit Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance initiatives.

Mr. Caplan was recruited to develop a Corporate IT function and consolidate IT responsibilities in the fastest growing division of a major media conglomerate. In addition to building out the IT function for the organization and leading the consolidated operations, Mr. Caplan and his were responsible for technology delivery and business support for users at over 100 offices across the United States. While tightly managing expense, Mr. Caplan and his teams delivered a number of innovative technology solutions that were key business enablers, such as tablet computing for sales teams. In this role, Mr. Caplan program managed the refreshment and on-going support of the company’s sales, distribution, ad creation, and back office systems. Benefits of the new automation included the reduction of administrative staff costs by 32%, reduction of report generation time by 90%, and reduction of software development costs by $1.1 Million. Mr. Caplan and his teams led targeted initiatives supporting over 20 business acquisition, divestiture, joint-venture, and start-up transactions, including opportunity assessment, alternatives analysis, planning, and execution.

Mr. Caplan joined this company in to lead the development of a division-level IT function supporting their Small Business Sales telemarketing group. Mr. Caplan took over a foundering project to build a new outbound telemarketing system, quickly assessed the project approach and architecture against industry best-practices, and formulated a number of course-corrections. The result was that after months of delays prior to his engagement, the system was successfully launched six months after Mr. Caplan’s initial involvement. Based upon his initial successes, Mr. Caplan’s responsibilities were expanded to include leadership of a team consisting of 400 IT professionals that built and supported software for 20 call centers.

Mr. Caplan was an original member of the team that led the company’s entry into client/server and business technology management consulting by defining and developing branded methodologies for assessing client requirements and defining solutions. To deploy the new methodologies, he developed and delivered training classes, case studies and simulations to certify consultants in the methodology. Finally, Mr. Caplan led a series of cross-industry projects to assess client client/server transition readiness. The baseline for these assessments was a study that Mr. Caplan co-authored on best practices in client/server computing.

Mr. Caplan worked with teams to deliver systems development and management consulting services to public and private sector clients. The primary focus of the organization was to deliver data management and client/server solutions to customers with complex enterprise and departmental information needs. Mr. Caplan provided a range of services to private sector and public sector clients including project definition, project planning and management, methodology development and training, data and process modeling, custom software development, and more generalized management consulting.