Franchise Corporation Streamlines Onboarding and Site Inspections
Corporate branding and operational compliance are key components of any organization. For enterprises operating in a franchise model, it’s even more critical that corporate offices are regularly evaluating brand and operational compliance across markets, sites, and franchise owners. The corporate office for one national franchise was completing handwriting site inspections for their franchise locations and reporting their findings back, which required manual re-entry into their outdated system. They turned to Stoneridge Software to deploy a solution that would streamline their processes and make franchise site inspections quicker, easier, and more efficient.
Stoneridge Software recommended using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement solutions, which would allow employees to be empowered to seamlessly capture field compliance data, track important franchisee information, and obtain a complete, 360-degree view of their partners – all in Dynamics 365, accessed from anywhere at any time.
Faster Franchise Onboarding
For this client, onboarding a new franchisee is a process that takes a minimum of six to eight months but can last up to a year. The corporate office faced mounting frustrations managing the onboarding process because it incorporated every department and internal communication processes, and handoff points weren’t defined. Leaders felt they were alienating their franchisees with out-of-sync and conflicting communication coming from so many different contacts within the corporate organization.
By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, they were able to define their onboarding process and develop a central location for task management and process handoffs.
Visibility Across Departments
Now each department at the corporate level – accounting, legal, marketing, training, facilities, and purchasing – has access to dashboards that display percentages of completed tasks for individual franchisees. A standard business process flow is launched when a potential franchisee sends in an inquiry. A notification is automatically generated for the first department involved. As tasks are completed, they are marked in Customer Engagement and a new notification is sent to the next department along with the tasks they need to complete before the process can move on to the next department.
This ensures each department is aware of where every franchisee is in the onboarding process, what communication has been sent, and what steps remain to be completed.
In an upcoming phase two of this project, the company plans on implementing a document management system that will integrate with the process flow and allow every document related to the onboarding to be stored on the franchisee’s account within Dynamics 365.
Site Inspections and Facility Reviews
Using mobile devices, site inspectors visit franchise sites and complete their inspection forms electronically. The custom form outlines requirements for branding, store layout, and other franchise mandates to facilitate measuring and reporting compliance alignment and violations. While on-site, the field operations team has access to historical data about the specific location. This allows the user to view any prior issues and assure they have been addressed and are now in compliance.
This specific franchise organization has a point system in place for compliance violations. Each item out of compliance results in a certain number of points being docked from the total score. Once that number reaches a certain level, a violation is issued. Violations hinder franchisees from attending certain corporate events, attaining product discounts, and can prohibit them from developing new franchises in other national markets. Because the violations are such a serious issue, each site inspector is required to take photos of each item that is in, or out of, compliance. Those images can be tracked and accessed within Dynamics 365.
Franchise Relocations
Like the onboarding process, there are steps that need to take place when a franchisee would like to open or move to a new location. Additional dashboards and business process flows were created to guide each involved corporate department along with the required steps to approving or denying a new location. Additionally, both existing and new franchise sites were integrated into advanced mapping and site locator tools for both franchisees and end customers to leverage.
Reporting
With advanced reporting capabilities, the corporate home office is able to quickly compile and better analyze data across sites, operators, and markets. Each department has instant access to critical, real-time information that drives process optimization and overall franchise quality. This allows the team to process franchise renewals faster, better understand underserved markets and plan for expansion, assess their projected sales, and much more.
By implementing Dynamics 365, this national franchise corporation was able to streamline their processes, eliminate manual data re-entry, and gain better visibility into their franchisee data.
Benefits included:
- Elimination of manual processes
- Consolidated communications
- Task management
- Process automation and workflows
- Mobile capabilities
- Advanced reporting
