Franchisees continue to exhibit the frontier spirit on which the US was built on. Franchise owners are independent and responsible for their own well-being and financial stability. As a franchisee owner these entrepreneurs have many things to manage with most of them not being tech savvy. As such, many of these entrepreneurs are lost when it comes to what technology is needed.
Franchise technology requirements vary depending on the type of franchise. For example, for all franchises a point-of-sale (POS) system is the heart of managing revenue and product. But for those in the food service industry technology that relays the customer’s order to the kitchen is critical to customer service. Yet, still for other franchisees like those in the service industry, need remote access to customer records, invoicing, and payment acceptance.
There are four critical technologies that are required to facilitate a franchise. These are voice services, Internet/data services, POS, security. However, as a franchise owner, a main focus for these technologies is going to be the cost to implement these technologies and the benefits and features of each.
Your phone service and equipment for your franchise has been and will continue to be a key technology for communicating with your customers. Today, voice technology is more than just a phone to receive and make calls. Voice can now be seen as an application on the data network with the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). By leveraging VoIP for your voice service a franchisee can now take advantage of combining their Internet/Data connection with their voice service further lowering their costs.
Integrating two of the four major technologies that every franchisee must consider enables the franchisee to further lower start-up costs by using newer enhanced services. For example, no longer is an onsite private branch exchange (PBX) or Key system required. Using a virtual PBX solution enables the franchise owner to manage not only his voice services from anywhere in the world but also manage messaging. Imagine, a business whereby constant availability and contact with your customer base Is paramount to long customer relationships. Through the use of a virtual PBX offering a business owner can receive their voice mail via their email system, receive faxes via their email system, send faxes from anywhere and even receive phones calls anywhere they wish by configuring a few simple options on their virtual PBX which is a web based interface. Many of the virtual PBX providers now offer as part of the monthly service fee the phone handsets for your franchise employees or phone stations at your facility.
The Point-of-Sale (POS) system is the heart of any franchisee owner. The latest convergence of cloud computing and 4G cellular networks will revolutionize the retail technology industry the same way the PC did when it changed a cash register into a POS. It will finally allow retail CIOs to take retail technology out of the stores and put it in the data center and have it managed by IT people.
Today, an average restaurant has eight to 10 pieces of technology that are complex enough to house their own operating systems. These same restaurants now have five or more vendors providing technical support. With the high level of integration, when a problem occurs the store manager is often hit with the “It’s not us, it’s them” excuse.
The store manager, who is typically not an IT administrator, is left trying to decipher cryptic error messages, leaning on a peer group and spending hours if not days on the phone with various support organizations trying to get to the root cause of the issue. Symptoms of this situation usually manifest themselves in screams from the back office: “I have already rebooted it 14 times. I am not doing it again!”
Using a POS cloud solution on the Internet this process is quite different. The POS server isn’t responding? No problem. We’ll instantly provision you a new one and tie it to the data that is accurate to your last transaction. Worried about your PCI audit? Don’t be. Ninety-eight percent of the technology is in the data center, which uses certified technology, secure communications and has implemented all the appropriate processes and procedures for you to be compliant. Upset about the rising costs of retail technology? Don’t be. By using virtual applications and sharing infrastructure, you can expect to reduce the costs to a store by 30 percent or more.
Sure, there are some Web-based POS systems on the market today, but most have been designed around single-terminal, small company systems. Running an entire retail operating system in the cloud (at least the technical components) requires changing the way you think about these systems.
As shown in the figure below box #1 illustrates the typical and more traditional POS system found in 99% of all franchise locations. The POS system typically a tower or desktop PC is located on site. For many franchise owners with multiple locations these on site POS servers would be reconciled with all the other locations via manual input from POS system reports. As technology moved on shown in box 2 below the franchise owner uses an IT infrastructure for updating the central POS repository with sales, inventory, labor and analysis data instead of manual data entry.
Moving even further in box 3 above the franchise owner can now take advantage of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) POS solutions. In this model the inventory and labor is hosted by a POS provider on the internet at their secured 24/7 IT staffed data center. Finally, in box 4 above the franchise owner end-user application is composed of services—some of which are hosted internally and some of which are provided by the SaaS-based service provide.
With cloud computing, the network becomes mission critical. If all the technology is off-site and you lose the capability to communicate, then you ability to service your customer has been compromised. DSL is the most unreliable. Cable connections and Verizon FiOS are much more stable and T1 and MPLS networks are expensive for the franchisee.
If combined with cable or a FiOS line, cellular broadband networks will provide extremely reliable high-bandwidth to locations for around $50 a month and provide the network redundancy needed for POS cloud solutions.
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The benefits for franchisees are significant. Cloud-based POS systems offer:
- Easier software upgrades. Simply install a new software version, test and then move sites one by one or all at once by just changing a pointer. Run multiple software versions in parallel by maintaining configuration files.
- Implement new sites by provisioning a new software instance, preconfigured with the appropriate metadata from previous sites (if applicable). Use enterprise hardware with data center administration with trained IT staff 24×7.
- No more polling. Write data from each transaction directly into the central database, with easy access to aggregate into back-office applications and decision-support systems.
- New cost models. A SaaS POS would consider business models such as pay-per-transaction or percent-of-sales pricing.
At the end of the day, the most important part of this evolution will be taking the burden of IT support out of the hands of the general manager and placing it in IT where it belongs. This change is something that can’t happen soon enough for many franchisees.
Finally, if you are a franchise owner with multiple locations or can always be at your single franchise location and need to keep track of each facility, then video surveillance is an ideal way for you to manage multiple locations from a single location. Imagine not having to drive to your various franchise locations to monitor the kitchen help, see the wait time for customer to be seated, or how long the check in line is at the counter.
Using video surveillance can provide an answer for this and more. Key factors in setting up video surveillance for your franchise:
- Place cameras in open areas like kitchens, lobbies, dining rooms, drive-through lanes, cash registers, and offices.
- Place fixed cameras near entrances and in drive-thru lanes in order to provide a clear picture every customer or visitor that enters and exits your restaurant
- Fixed cameras placed near cash registers and in administrative areas can help protect assets.
- Outside cameras (drive-through, perimeter cameras, et al) can help protect your outdoor dining areas, play areas, and drive-through.
Below is a sample camera configuration at a popular restaurant franchise. Note that the franchise owner not only wanted to keep tabs on his own operations but also of the surrounding locations that have caused the owner issues in the past. For this configuration being a casual service restaurant it is important to follow the following design criteria:
- Place cameras in open areas like dining rooms to protect customers and prevent theft.
- Cameras in your kitchen can help you monitor workplace safety and keep your facilities up to municipal health codes
- Place cameras near entrances and exits in order to get an image of each customer and visitor as they come and go.
- Fixed cameras near office safes and cash registers can help prevent theft.
In the above example of a video camera layout for inside a restaurant chain some key locations have been chosen. All door entrances are monitored to view people coming in and out of the facility. A camera is placed in the main office to view entrance and cover the safe for the restaurant. Areas of the kitchen are monitored to view potential or false slip-and-falls as evidence for workers compensation claims. The second floor storage room and liquor room are monitored to thwart theft. The bar area is monitored to assist in observing customer behavior and gathering evidence of theft and unruliness. Monitoring the cash registers in the bar with POS text overlay/collection for ensuring proper entry and collection is paramount in a facility with a liquor license.
The outside video surveillance is quite different. As shown below this franchise owner is not only looking to monitor their immediate area but to also monitor surrounding locations like the nightclub, a SYMs clothing store parking lot and a Firestone tire center parking lot as well. This is done because of past experiences of rowdy club goers damaging their customer cars, theft in the overflow parking area in the SYMs parking lot and vandalism in the Firestone tire center parking lot.
On the outside camera layout above two cameras with infrared lights are used at the main entrance and the backdoor entrance. This is to ensure during late hours when outside lights are off or dimmed that people trying to enter during this time are caught on video. A concern for this franchise owner is gather license plate images due to the proximity of the location to a main highway. This is important to assist police in identifying potential thieves, vandals, and other investigative requirements.
To make all the above work a local area network (LAN) connection for the franchise restaurant is required. Below is an example of a design that facilitates the transport of video throughout the system but also incorporates the POS network, office network and a guest wireless network.
The franchise owner can access the local video surveillance server from the Internet to view the cameras or any pre-recorded video. This gives the franchise owner the ability to monitor multiple locations from a single location.
A key to managing a franchise is keeping track of the POS operations. A video surveillance system integrating different registers can enable you to remotely manage POS operations.
Get better insight by integrating high resolution, real-time surveillance video with your point-of-sale (POS) system data.
The POS Client software associates your point-of-sale transaction data with corresponding video, making it searchable by either video or POS criteria.
Quickly find and review video and POS transaction data side by side to make sure transaction data aligns with video. The POS Client makes it easy to:
- Search and see video associated with purchases for any date, register, total, exception code, cashier, or article
- Monitor live transactions side-by-side with real-time video
- Save, play back, and export executable, authenticated clips of integrated video and POS data
- Search through old POS entries and find the associated video
- Protect against fraudulent claims with authenticated integrated evidence of any transaction
- Curb improper employee behavior
- Build your revenues and capture a return on your investment with sophisticated business intelligence about customer demographics and purchasing patterns:
- Who's buying your most expensive items?
- Who spends the most time with your staff, causing delays checking out?
- Who responds best to at-register promotions?
Planning for viewing the collected video requires understanding the limits of your Internet bandwidth. Remote video viewing of one camera can consume up to 100Kbps of bandwidth leaving your franchise location and being sent to your viewing location. Viewing 16 cameras at one time would require 1.6Mbps of bandwidth leaving your franchise facility. Thus, video surveillance creates a demand on your internet bandwidth and connection.
Broadband Crossing advisors have over 28 years of design, engineering, implementation and management of telecommunications experience. If you need help we are here to answer your questions and assist you in ordering, installing and managing the right solution for your company. Go to our contact page or better yet why not just start the process by generating a free price quote. Just go to www.broadbandcrossing.com and begin. Compare your current pricing for voice, data and Internet service against what we can provide and you will find that our pricing and service cannot be beat. Go ahead give us try.
