Selling your products through a wide franchise or points of sale (POS) network is a proven way to increase your sales and reach while keeping a lid on overall costs. However, as many franchise business operators would agree, this model has its share of shortcomings, especially in an age where physical retail is faced with a rampaging ecommerce model.
For instance, the decentralized franchise system often gets unwieldy to manage. This subsequently impacts data collection, data analysis, and data reporting efforts of franchisors and businesses. The result? These companies often lose out on potential revenue/sales, suffer higher operating costs, and get blindsided by upstart competitors.
So, how can a franchise or POS retail business overcome these common franchise problems and carve a path towards greater profitability and agility?
The answer lies in business intelligence and data analytics, or FranchisorPal.
As you’ll find out through the rest of this post, our in-house business intelligence services can help your franchise business make the most of its data and become a customer-centric organization. We also talk about how FranchisorPal helped a German tire manufacturer create a data analytics framework for a POS network that spanned 30+ countries.
What is FranchisorPal?
FranchisorPal is a business intelligence and data analytics solution that helps multi-location franchise businesses increase their productivity, streamline operations, cut costs, and improve profitability by engaging with their points of sale in a smarter way.
The FranchisorPal solution helps businesses use data for making every decision. Apart from increasing the pace and accuracy at which decisions are made, this also helps set accountability for each stakeholder from employees to suppliers and vendors. This cohesion helps a business achieve its goals faster while maintaining high customer satisfaction.
Moreover, the best franchise management software is one that can be customized to your needs and existing systems. FranchisorPal ticks that box as it’s a fully customizable solution that can be integrated into the existing technology stack of any business, operating in any industry vertical.
What are the main features of FranchisorPal?
Predictive Analytics and Forecasting: FranchisorPal uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) predictive analytics to help you predict sales. This information can then help you with forecasting, inventory planning, fleet management, and operational efficiency.
Automated Intelligent Alerts: FranchisorPal offers an AI-powered alerting mechanism that can send you leading as well as trailing alerts on a variety of parameters. In keeping with its full-customizability, you can set these alerts for rules/parameters specific to your business.
Push-based System: FranchisorPal features a push-based system to improve workforce engagement. The system helps you send real-time alerts to your workforce regarding their performance, especially with respect to peers. On a franchisee level, the system helps you spot and reward better performers while throwing light on the ones that need more support.
Mobility: FranchisorPal delivers data-backed, actionable insights in real-time to your mobile device(s). Since these insights will help the decision-making process at different levels within your organization, they are presented in an easy-to-understand manner using infographics, charts, animation etc.
How FranchisorPal Helped a European MNC Become More Profitable (Case Study)
Before we get into the details of how our business intelligence services helped a client, let’s quickly run through the client and the problem they faced.
Based out of Germany, our client is one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers and operates a tire distribution network that includes 3,300 retail locations spread over 30 countries around the world.
While this reach was a source of strength for the client, it also presented a problem when it came to collecting and analysing critical data that is used to measure operational efficiency and set profitability metrics. What compounded the problem was that they used disparate systems which did a poor job of warehousing and reporting data from vendors and retail partners.
Moreover, the purchase data of no two tire manufacturing partners was the same, causing the client to spend expensive hours of manual labour for organizing this data into a uniform format. Together, these issues delayed the generation of accurate purchase and sales data, preventing the client from making quick and data-informed decisions.
The result? The client neither had a clear measure of their product margins nor did they have any insight into the performance of their retail partners.
What Solutions Did FranchisorPal Provide
Designing an ETL Process:
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is a process to integrate data from diverse sources. This is done primarily in three steps, starting with extracting data from different sources, then transforming the data, before finally loading the data into the data warehousing system.
The ETL process we designed for our client automated the acquisition and consolidation of diverse purchase and sales data from different sources around the world.
Designing a Structured Metadata:
The simplest way to define Metadata is that it is the data about your data. This means it could contain data related to your warehoused data such as the source of extracted data, features of data, transformation logic for that extracted data, timestamps etc., making it a vital feature of any franchise operations software.
By designing a structured Metadata for our client, we ensured that all changes to the source systems, the ETL process, and the resulting data are recorded. This helps you analyse your data more efficiently and accurately.
Creating a User-friendly Reporting Suite:
The collected, transformed, and analysed data has to be presented in a user-friendly manner. This helps every stakeholder, from the CEO to the intern and from the supplier to the retailer, to use this data for making decisions. Which is why user-friendly reporting is a cornerstone of the best franchise software systems.
With FranchisorPal, we developed a user-friendly reporting suite that presented critical data to not just the client’s headquarters but also to each one of the 3,300 retail locations around the world. Every link in the chain was strengthened with the power of knowledge.
Building a Comprehensive Dashboard:
Dashboards in franchise business intelligence systems help to present complex, multi-layered information in an easy-to-understand manner. They further help with increasing decision-making efficiency, enabling accurate forecasting, controlling inventory better, and getting real-time customer and employee analytics.
FranchisorPal offers a variety of visually interactive dashboards that the client used to get a bird’s eye view of vital parameters, helping them make accurate business decisions faster.
How FranchisorPal Benefitted the Client
Armed with the ability to make data-informed business decisions on both the supply side as well as the sales side, our client achieved a 7% reduction in costs within a quarter of investing in FranchisorPal.
“eLuminous’s BI solution helped us collect accurate figures from our suppliers, which gave us a comprehensive overview of sales, shop-wise and country-wise. In addition to helping us forecast production several months in advance, FranchisorPal also helped us monitor sales campaigns for each market/country.” – client’s IT Manager
FranchisorPal further helped the client identify the bestsellers in its product range for each retail outlet and country. This helped them optimize the product mix for each location, leading to an increase in sales at negligible extra spending.
Apart from reducing operating costs and increasing sales, FranchisorPal also helped our client plan the extension of their sales footprint to more countries/regions. That’s because FranchisorPal provides a scalable data foundation that makes it easy to expand while keeping complexity under control.
FranchisorPal Can Help You Too
Our business intelligence and data analytics solution can help you with making sense of your data. In a world where competition is fierce and margins for mistakes razor-thin, organizations that rely on solid data to make decisions will inch ahead of those that use a gut-based, ad-hoc decision-making approach.
The FranchisorPal solution though is steeped in data science and can make a valuable difference to an organization operating in any industry. For instance, in addition to the tire industry example discussed here, we’ve also helped organizations from the automobile, fashion retail, and industrial tools segments with their business intelligence services requirements.
To know more about how FranchisorPal’s customizability and scalability can help your organization become more efficient, more profitable, and more customer-centric, get in touch with us today.
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Responsible for developing and managing web presence, Sarah has been associated with eLuminous Technologies for 7+ years. Strategic and innovative with a passion for Content Marketing and enhancing brand awareness. Administered all business marketing operations and advertisement campaigns that eventually increased web traffic. She works under the motto “Think like a Publisher, not a Marketer.”
