Why franchise owners should consider BI

While smaller franchise operations might be able to extract a daily sales report from their point of sale (POS) system, these companies have been limited in their ability to analyse, compare and better understand their sales information.

“Business intelligence (BI) is typically perceived to be expensive, but the benefits far outweigh the initial outlay and can provide a competitive advantage,” says Caron Mooney, director of Microsoft Gold certified partner, IS Partners.

“Through a group implementation, the franchise owner will receive a direct benefit, and the requirement for participation in these initiatives deserves serious consideration and a complete commitment to the process,” she adds.

Sales predictions:
BI gives franchises the ability to analyse sales by time of day, day of week or year. Information can, for example, be matched to advertising and promotional campaigns to determine effectiveness and ROI.

Identifying new product opportunities:
The popularity of meals, in terms of which variations are most often chosen together, can be determined and new offerings created based on this information. This will also allow for improved planning of specials, for example.

Revenue optimisation:
BI can allow franchise owners to monitor the effect on revenue of increasing or decreasing prices.

Comparative analysis:
The franchisor will be able to compare statistics from various outlets and obtain demographics from similar regions. This can facilitate an improved distribution of outlets per region.

Staffing:
BI will allow franchise owners to optimise the sales workforce based on their busiest times, and staff operations accordingly.

Meaningful reports:
Entering information from the POS system into spreadsheets can be a frustrating process. BI will ensure that standard reports can be automatically generated based on individual requirements. Then it will allow further analysis of the information, instead of spending time getting data into a spreadsheet.

External demographics:
Using BI, franchise owners can determine who their immediate community is and so understand their customers better.

“As the existing POS system will feed into a central data warehouse, information will be automatically 'scrubbed' to provide better feedback on analyses, accurate reports and consequently ensure improved decision-making,” says Mooney.

“Franchise owners are not always best positioned to do the analyses themselves, but the franchisor is. Based on data fed into the data warehouse, information can be supplied back to best advise owners on how to optimise various aspects of their business.

“Every major franchisor in the world will have BI as a standard. Local and smaller franchisors are at a competitive disadvantage without it,” she adds.