Integrated Business Operations for Franchise – The What, Why and How?

Growing Pains – Integrated Business Operations for Franchises.

As a franchisor, you know that any type of organisational change is going to bring a world of pain. The scale of business operations across a franchisor – franchisee network make it a tough ship to change course on.

Yet the way technology is evolving demands franchisors to constantly re-evaluate their business operations and suppliers to ensure that they are keeping up with an increasingly shifting landscape.

What do integrated business operations even look like?

Now that’s a hard question to answer.

Every business and industry is shaped differently. But here are three key principles to help you achieve enterprise optimisation.

1. Integrate your applications.

Technology is literally eating business operations.

We all know that integrating our applications are a must, but businesses of all shapes and sizes must now come to terms with the fact that they have technology debt.

What is technology debt?

When it comes to service workflows, integrated systems are a must. A staff member should be able to take an order and have it sync up to the payments device seamlessly.

Why?

Because in this day and age, consumers don’t like waiting. If they see a queue they’re going to walk right by the store. And what does this mean?

Lost business. And no one likes lost business.

Now that’s just your payments. There are a whole lot of other systems running in the backgrounds of each franchise. Helping your franchisees understand how to find business efficiencies is key to growing your business.

Integrated systems also allow for more visibility in head quarters. When franchisees understand how and when their customers are transacting this will have implications for staffing, stock and much more.

Now we’re talking top and bottom line revenue growth across the franchise network.

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2. Communicate, communicate, communicate

Change management is key in larger organisations.

An integrated business communicates. Executive and leadership teams need consistently to align multiple functions across the business to continually achieve business objectives.

Understanding the constraints that you’re working within will help you drive change with the least amount of friction.

Communicating with all stakeholders involved to gather requirements before your project plan will mean the difference between a successful changeover and a world of pain.

When your franchisees understand the value that the operational change will bring, they are more likely to be on board.

3.Test and learn

In an increasingly digitised world, franchisors need to stay abreast of trends sweeping wider consumer landscapes.

You need to routinely review customer demand, supply resources and “re-plans” quantitatively across a set rolling horizon.

This way innovation is baked into your process.

Your replanning should focus on future actions and anticipated results.

This means a need to clearly articulate the business case and set clear key performance indicators against the initiatives.

This framework will allow you the flexibility to identify and scale successful initiatives and shut down underperforming ones.

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In Conclusion

When it comes to switching out business processes, handling change with clear metrics and communicating the value consistently through the business will aid a smoother process.

Thinking about switching out your acquiring solution? Speak to our friendly franchise team at Tyro. Get in touch today.