Working Together in Real Time

Client Overview

Our client is a franchise organization that has maintained its commitment to product quality even with spectacular growth.  This commitment to their product has enabled the company to expand to over 100 locations all over the U.S.  Our client provides to its franchisees a large support staff in the areas of finance, marketing, business consulting, training and product development.  Communication among franchisees is one of the key factors to our client success.

Business Challenges

One of the challenges our client faced was a lack of visibility to into sales across it's network of franchisees.  Gathering this information was a time intensive process and not in real time.  Having visibility in real-time gives them a better grasp on the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.  Another challenge our client faced was the lack of vendor responsiveness on issues related to their current point of sale (POS) system.  Many support request were going unanswered or unresolved.   It was time for a change.

Agosto’s Solution

Our goal was to help our client make the best decision possible and work within the budget that they had allocated.  Upgrading the point-of-sale (POS) system so headquarters would have visibility into the franchise network will lay the foundation for further growth.  Having an enterprise POS system not only allows for better information flow between corp. and franchisees, but it will provide a more stable, standardized, and centralized environment.  This upgrade will also allow for timely and accurate sales tracking where our client can easily identify inventory levels and buyer behavior in real time.  For example, our client's requirements were to be able to see if an increase in sales of certain new product has been affected by a marketing campaign.  Using this new system our client is able to connect marketing dollars spend with the actual sales.

To overcome our client’s challenges with their current system our team created Request for Proposal (RFP) which was then submitted to fifteen POS vendors.  The evaluation of the vendors was based on four criteria: affordability, our client’s requirements, loyalty and gift card integration, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.  Currently, we are choosing between two potential vendors.

In order to help our client make a good decision, we implemented a feature analysis platform.  We brought our SaaS expertise to the table and implemented a Quality assurance tool called Run Test Run that lives in the cloud.  This is a quality assurance testing tool which enabled individual employees to test their respective departments, i.e. marketing can test marketing features, operations can test operations features, etc.

At this point we will be completing our testing and moving into the deployment phase.  More on this later.