The CIO's Guide to Selecting Software for Retail Franchises

The CIO’s Guide to Selecting Software for Retail Franchises

01 | The CIO’s Guide to Selecting Software for Retail Franchises

Managing retail franchise operations brings about unique challenges and op-portunities from a software standpoint. Franchisees want their independence, and ability to manage their businesses according to unique local demands, while franchisors need flexible controls to en-sure the health of the overall brand.

Finding a single POS or retail ERP solu-tion that meets the needs of the franchi-sor and all franchisees can be a difficult task. Historically, some franchisors have even left the software selection up to the

individual franchisees, resulting in a mish-mash of disparate, disconnected systems. The downsides to this arrangement are numerous, and even more obvious in to-day’s omni-channel marketplace.

Whether you’re running an exclusively franchised model or a mix of corporate-owned and franchise stores, and whether your stores are full franchises (franchisee owns and controls inventory) or sub-license franchises (the brand owns and controls inventory), Raymark has the solu-tions you need.

The CIO’s Guideto Selecting Software for Retail Franchises

Copyright 2014 Raymark Xpert Business Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Challenges of Operating Disparate Retail Systems

1. Added costs of software licenses, host-ing and maintenance.

2. Additional IT resources needed to man-age disparate systems and databases.

4. Added costs for integration.

3. Lack of real-time visibility into inven-tory and sales, resulting in uninformed purchase and allocation decisions.

4. Added risk of error or fraud.

5. Poorer customer service due to lack of centralized inventory visibility.

6. Lack of centralized reporting.

7. Reduced productivity due to duplicate entry of data.


Raymark Solutions for Franchise Retail

Franchises are a popular business model used by retailers look-ing to expand their distribution locally or internationally with little capital investment. However, franchisors are often faced with the dilemma of not retaining enough control over franchisee opera-tions.

One of Raymark’s main differentiators is our proprietary Point of Business Concept. Administrators can configure the Point of Business (POB) to be anything from a buyer’s workstation, a point of sale terminal, or a warehouse receiving station, allowing each one to perform its unique tasks within a centralized database.

Retailers with franchise operations usually host a combination of both corporately owned flagship stores, and franchise operated field stores. This hybrid business model creates a need for a re-tail software solution that enables head office to manage multiple business entities simultaneously while allowing each of those entities to interact seamlessly with corporate.

Using Raymark’s centralized retail enterprise solutions, franchi-sors obtain real-time control of and visibility into pricing struc-tures, sales numbers, and stock requirements while still allowing their franchisees to operate independently.

Managed Flexibility

From a data standpoint, many retailers with a combination of both corporate and franchise owned stores struggle with data segregation and store group management. Raymark’s archi-tecture allows for the ability to segregate information based on logical business units. Read, edit and write access to customer information, purchase orders, products, promotions, gift cards and more can be limited using Raymark’s store access and con-figuration modules. This can be limited to a single franchise store or can include a group of stores.

Raymark point of sale solutions allow stores to be defined through a three-tiered structure of associations, and support a multi-store grouping structure built on multiple business units (i.e. groups and grids for pricing, discounts, costs, etc.).

Filtering store transactional information within a store group means that stores, employees, purchase orders, transfers, sales transactions, customers, receiving and adjustments can all be filtered and managed from a store group perspective.

The owner of a store group will have access to ALL stores within the defined group, but not other groups. Each store will have access only to their own information based on predetermined security settings.




1

HARDWARE INDEPENDENCERaymark’s flexibility and

adaptability allows all stores to have a variety of hardware configurations, so store own-ers can continue to work with the equipment they are most familiar and comfortable with.

Even Raymark’s mobile solu-tions are hardware agnostic, so they can be deployed to

a variety of device types and form factors.

2

CONFIGURABLE PRICES

Owners have the flexibility to regulate in-store pricing by

using either corporate recom-mendations or setting the

price to suit the local market. Prices can be changed in real-time for multiple stores at a

time.

Cost and price structures can be associated in accordance with the franchisee, the store group, or the corporate store.

3

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Franchisees can opt to pur-chase stock from a preferred vendor or combine purchases

with head office to benefit from group discounts.

Franchisees can perform both centralized and decen-

tralized stock purchasing, and purchase stock that is not within the main corporate

inventory product list. Fran-chisors can additionally opt to sell inventory to their franchi-

sees at a profit.

4

AUTONOMOUS REPLENISHMENT

Raymark solutions also allow each franchisee to configure their own replenishment and

stock level models.

Alternatively, replenishment can be managed centrally

from the corporate office, al-lowing the entire organization

to benefit from volume dis-counts on bulk orders as well

as more efficient inventory management.

5

CONFIGURABLE PROMOTIONS

Depending on the franchise model, promotions can either

be managed centrally or at the franchisee level or store

group level.

Promotions can be configured to become active only at spe-cific days or even time of day (for example, a one-hour-only

event).

6

CUSTOMERPROFILES

Rules can be configured with regards to the visibility

each store has into customer profile information. Visibility can be limited to the current store, the franchisee’s group

of stores, or widened to include the entire enterprise,

even e-commerce profiles and all in real-time.

Raymark5460 Côte de Liesse Montréal, QuébecCanada H4P 1A5T: 1-800-346-7296F: 1-514-737-0014E: [email protected]: www.raymark.com

For 25 years, Raymark has been empowering retail with leading-edge enterprise software solutions that help the world’s most prestigious international retailers optimize stock turns, build customer loyalty, and increase sales. Raymark develops and markets the ultimate suite of flex-ible and interconnected applications deployed in a centralized environ-ment and offers professional turnkey solutions including implementa-tion, training and customer support. www.raymark.com