Bakers Delight

SharePoint InfoPath Workflows Rise to Bakery Franchise Challenge.

Bakers Delight is a Melbourne-based food retail franchise, with over 700 bakeries in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. Effective oversight of franchisees was inhibited by a cumbersome paper-based assessment process. As a result, neither head office staff nor store managers could react quickly to assessment results, and Bakers Delight had difficulty conducting comparative and trend analyses. Bakers Delight devised an automated mobile assessments process. Using InfoPath 2007 forms, auditors transmitted assessment data via Microsoft Office® Outlook® from tablet PCs to the company SQL Server database, and out onto the Microsoft Office SharePoint® 2007 portal. Customised workflows and an events handler channelled data into the company’s CRM database and generated reports. The simplified process enabled Bakers Delight to increase the frequency of assessments and concentrate on problem areas. Integration with the business’ CRM system provided in-depth franchise analysis and performance reporting

Business Needs

Bakers Delight is a Melbourne-based retail bakery franchise operating across Australia and New Zealand. Between 2003 and 2008, the company expanded into the United States and Canada, increasing the number of stores from approximately 600 to 710. It now employs about 200 head office staff.

To maintain the quality of its brand and products, Bakers Delight maintained a vigorous franchise assessment program. Area managers visited stores to check on the condition of the bakery, the retail environment, product quality, and health and safety. However, the paper-based assessment process was cumbersome, slow, inflexible, and lacking in objectivity.

“The process was very manual,” says Peter Carrodus, Group Services Manager, Bakers Delight. “The managers used carbon multi-copy stationery, which we had printed periodically in large batches.”

After conducting assessments, managers collated scores on a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheets were emailed back to head office where the data was manually keyed into the company database housed on Microsoft SQL Server® 2000.

The results were used to generate reports for head office managers, who wanted to track performance. Individual assessments were also dispatched back to the bakeries so they knew how well they were performing, and could take appropriate actions. The process was inherently inefficient.

“The forms took a long time to fill out, and the collations were very labor intensive, and sometimes inaccurate. There was also a high turnaround time, which impacted on the effectiveness of the assessment process, because the business could not react quickly to problems in particular bakeries.”

The assessment process was also costly and the data it delivered was not always as helpful as it could be.

“If any of our assessment criteria changed, then we had to reprint the stationery,” says Carrodus. But one of the main problems was objectivity. The area managers naturally had a business relationship with their franchisees, and any number of factors could impair them from giving objective assessments.

“What we wanted were full-time auditors who just did assessments. We believed that if we could take assessment out of the normal area manager’s role, then we would have more consistency and we could also run the assessments more frequently.”

To do this, Bakers Delight would have to devise an entirely new assessment process, and Carrodus was keen that the benefits of any change were not squandered by hanging on to the inefficient and time-wasting paper-based system.

“Our requirement was that the people who did the assessments needed to be able to disappear into the wilderness and just do audits. We needed them to do that covertly, and then be able to get the results back quickly.”

Solution

Bakers Delight already used Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Its original objective had been to improve the company intranet, and enable the head office to make its reports, recipes, and sales performance data more accessible to franchisees. In 2006 Bakers Delight had also implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help with the challenge of managing nearly 700 bakeries across four different countries.

They believed that Bakers Delight could use tablet PCs and InfoPath functionality in conjunction with SharePoint to develop an electronic-forms–based assessment process for independent auditors. They also believed they could integrate such data into the CRM system to give Bakers Delight comprehensive and up-to-date franchise data.

“InfoPath was there, but it wasn’t used very much,” says Saddler. “Basically, one of its biggest strengths is that it just looks like a PDF, but with drop-down lists, data validation, and a capacity for data entry.”

“Bakers Delight already had this with their existing version of SharePoint, but I don’t think anyone anticipated what InfoPath could really do, or the extent to which it could be developed.”

In September 2006, Bakers Delight implemented Microsoft SharePoint 2007, and immediately began to develop a sophisticated assessment process based on the increased InfoPath functionality available in the latest release.

“We built a user interface for data capture on tablet PCs,” explains Saddler. “This consisted of an InfoPath assessment form with specific fields for entering assessment information, according to each assessment question.”

“Bakers Delight needed a mobile and easy-to-use solution. Consequently, the forms are designed so that auditors could physically write into the fields with an electronic pen. This meant we had to make sure that electronic forms recognized handwritten numbers.”

“Then we had to write some code, so that the forms data is automatically converted to PDF-type documents and XML files, and dispatched via Microsoft Office Outlook to the company’s SharePoint server.”

The InfoPath 2007 functionality means that forms can be filled in while the tablet PCs are offline, and then files are automatically sent as an email once a connection is re-established. SharePoint was programmed to listen for emails containing the InfoPath XML, and these are downloaded automatically onto the SharePoint site.

There are three components to what happens next, an events handler exports the assessment data in the Infopath XML file to the Microsoft SQL database. Then a Microsoft CRM web service captures the assessment and imports it into the CRM database.

Finally, one workflow was written so that reports are dispatched immediately to managers and franchisees, and another workflow so that at the end of each quarter, when all the assessments are in, the collated results are sent back out to the bakeries.

The actual development work took place gradually as refinements were made. However, the core coding and implementation was completed in four months and the system was functional by the end of 2007.

The result was a system that enabled Bakers Delight to pull the data from independent assessments as soon as they were completed, generated reports on demand, and fed the data into the company’s franchise-management CRM system.

Benefits

Customized InfoPath forms and SharePoint workflows give Bakers Delight a fast, sophisticated, and objective franchise assessment process that delivers comprehensive report data automatically to head office managers and franchisees.

Faster response time

The turnaround time for assessments is now much faster. The average processing time between conducting an assessment and Bakers Delight receiving the results used to be 18 days. Now the company receives the results as soon as the auditor has filled in the forms and the tablet PC establishes a connection.

The SharePoint workflows ensure that results are collated as soon as they are completed, and that managers receive reports immediately.

“We used to wait for everything to be collated centrally,” says Carrodus. “There was a gap of many weeks between the audit and the franchisee getting the results. Now we and the franchisees get the results the same day.”

According to Carrodus, timely objective assessments are a critically important contribution to effective franchise management.

“Since they are impartial, they’re taken more seriously, and bakery operators can react immediately. They are also used as a motivational tool for store staff.”

Better focus and comprehensive analysis

Instead of conducting one assessment per year, Bakers Delight now conducts assessments each quarter. The increase in frequency means Bakers Delight now knows more about its franchise businesses. In addition, the flexibility to change the questions asked at each assessment also means the business can focus quickly on problem areas.

“After implementation, the results we got were generally a lot lower,” says Denis Littleford, Stakeholder Relations Manager, Bakers Delight. “So with the second round of assessments, we focused on the areas of the business that required attention. The new system means that management can react a lot faster, and we can already see improvements in the performance of our franchises.”

Because the data is integrated with the company CRM database, Bakers Delight can draw correlations between store data and store performance.

“We get detailed information from every survey, so we can analyze trends,” says Carrodus. “If I find that a particular product isn’t being made properly, I can see if it’s related to a piece of machinery that might need to be replaced. Or perhaps there’s a safety issue. We maintain records of what safety switches are installed, so we can take action”.

“At the end of each review process, it’s easy to see trends and answer the question: ‘Why is a score so low?’ We could have done this with the previous process, but we would have had to go through reams of paper. The point is, now it’s very easy for us to compare franchises.”

InfoPath as a company-wide tool

Although InfoPath forms were developed specifically for the franchise assessments process, the success of the system has encouraged other parts of the business to continue to develop new forms for different functions.

“We’re improving it all the time, and constantly making changes, the changes involve improving the structure of the original forms and adding more rules to the workflow.”

The result is that the forms now capture much more information. For example, one of the things Bakers Delight supplies to its franchisees is marketing. Obviously the marketing department has a hunger for more information, and they want to communicate better with all their stores in their different markets. We can use the InfoPath assessment forms to help them do this. In fact, the more people inside Bakers Delight that find out about this solution, the more they want to use it and the data we can capture.

Littleford concurs: “We can generate more sophisticated reports – far more detailed than we have ever been able to before. Now I can look across 700 bakeries and see exactly what needs to be addressed.”