Harnessing Data to Drive Franchise Success

Visualize real-time information from across your business to generate insights about what’s working, what can be improved, and what comes next.

truOI: monitor, measure, & improve operations

To be as efficient and profitable as they can, franchisees need visibility into all aspects of their operations and the ability to make adjustments when needed. Franchisors need to unify and optimize growing numbers of diverse franchise locations. Putting holistic information at their fingertips offers both franchisees and franchisors sophisticated insight and control.

The information that flows through every business is the?lifeblood of its success, from the simple act of tallying up revenue to fine-tuning tactics and strategy for a location, region, or global collection of stores. Nevertheless, the reality is that—especially for small organizations and sole proprietors—gathering business data and generating maximum value from it has always been a challenge.

Empowering Franchisees with High-Quality Information

Whether they operate one franchise location or dozens,?franchisees?constantly make decisions about everything from staffing levels and marketing promotions to pricing and inventory. While these decisions are critical, there is often little or no hard information to base them on. Instead, they may be made subjectively using intuition and best inferences, which can introduce unwelcome risk and jeopardize results.

Franchise owners and managers can reduce day-to-day business risk when they base decisions on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Comparing KPIs against past values and target levels gives you a snapshot of the health of the business, compared to historical and planned outcomes. Tracking values as a function of time can provide insights about patterns and trends, for early insights and predictions.

To make data-driven decisions, you need raw data to be transformed into practical information you can use. truOI makes business data understandable and useful to help direct real-world business processes. High-quality data-based decision making depends on a broad range of prerequisites, including the following:

• Real-time updates.?Business metrics are constantly changing, and dashboards need to keep pace by updating the present view of KPIs, the relationships between them, and progress against historical data.
• Data visualization.?Assembling and interpreting data visually with charts, graphs, and infographics can help make its meaning more intuitive to both managers and employees, increasing its value.
• Robust interactivity.?It’s critical to be able to manipulate the information views on dashboards easily and flexibly, plus make them actionable with alerts when thresholds are reached and coaching to guide the next steps.

truOI helps busy franchisee management keep track of how well the business is performing on any given timeframe, from an instantaneous view to one that stretches over weeks, months, or years. Personnel can use whatever device they have at their disposal, from a desktop or laptop computer to a smartphone or tablet, fueling performance improvement immediately and over the long term.

Helping Franchisors Unite Operators Under an Umbrella of Best Practices

Engaging with unit or multi-unit operators to help maximize factors such as end-customer experience, operational efficiency, and profitability is critical for?franchisors. That effort requires wrapping training, monitoring, and coaching capabilities into a holistic bundle that can be replicated across locations regardless of size, location, and other factors, scaling smoothly as the overall company grows.

truOI puts both real-time data and strategic insights at the fingertips of both corporate analysts and franchise operators, in a sophisticated yet easy-to-digest form. For example, visualizations such as heat maps and success speedometers can track sales against factors such as product categories, labor costs, and franchise locations.

Robust algorithms can detect when a data point or relationship passes outside set limits, to generate an alert and provide coaching assistance to get back on track. Franchisors can provision proactive measures into these systems that combine statistical analysis and human experience, to replace the ad hoc, reactive approaches that the business might otherwise have to depend on.

Just as important, franchisors can use truOI to deploy decision science to franchisees at any technical skill level. The platform keeps them up to date and helps them turn emerging data into actionable business decisions that match up better with overall corporate strategy. Critical aspects to enable that relationship include the following:

• Automated insight and direction.?Monitoring and analysis functions identify important circumstances and alert the relevant people without relying on humans to notice changes on their own.
• Simple, broad data connectivity.?Access to the broadest possible range of data sources, such as point-of-sale terminals, cloud services, and data-center systems, maximizes the value of decision science.
• Extensibility for the future.?Standards-based, open technologies help prevent getting locked into a single technology approach, so you can integrate with future systems easily and inexpensively.

By building a data-driven success system for franchisees, corporations provide the basis for continuous operational and financial improvement. Dynamic?operational intelligence scorecards?provide constant situational awareness and corrective guidance when it’s needed.

Conclusion

truOI is an operating division of iDashboards, an industry leader providing integrated monitoring and management scorecards and dashboards that improve operational excellence across industries for over 20 years. With this personalized monitoring, training, and management platform, franchisees can be more profitable, and franchisors can build quality and consistency across operating sites.?Get started growing your company with operational intelligence.