omino's Pizza Inc. thinks communicating with franchisees is as important an ingredient for success as pesto or pepperoni. When a Domino's franchisee fails to meet corporate sales targets, for instance, Domino's staff must work closely with that franchisee to get sales back on track.
But the pizza chain's structure makes effective communications a challenge. Domino's has a small headquarters staff in Ann Arbor, Mich., plus mobile consultants and field managers that act as franchise advisers and intermediaries to its 1,350 franchises across the country. The $2.8 billion franchisor thinks it has found an answer in a groupware application based on adapted sales-force automation software that runs on Lotus Notes.
The Domino's application, called Contact Log, is designed to plug glaring communications gaps, particularly between headquarters staff and its field managers, that affect Domino's ability to keep tabs on fran
chisees. For instance, traveling field consultants might work with the owner of a franchise that failed inspections to devise a plan to get the franchise in compliance. But later, this same franchisee would sometimes contact Domino's headquarters franchise services staff and discuss a completely different solution. The result: Field managers were cut out of the communications loop, and the original fix was disregarded.
The communication problems also could lead to unapproved deviations from Domino's corporate sales promotions. "It was very apparent it needed to be fixed," says George Azrak, Domino's director for IS development. "We needed something that would enable these mobile managers to document their plans with franchisees and share the results with people at headquarters."
Fast Fix
The need was immediate enough that Domino's didn't attempt to precisely measure the proposed system's return on investment. "The ramifications of not fixing this communication problem were too serious," s
ays Azrak. Nor did the company spend years looking for the perfect solution. Instead, it looked for an off-the-shelf package that would do the job-quickly.
The company didn't find an exact fit, but Paul Messink, Domino's manager for desktop systems, realized the system the company was seeking had much in common with sales-force automation software. So Domino's started looking at SFA packages. Last July, it picked the Notes-based IntellAgent Control from IntellAgent Control Corp. in Dallas over another Notes application, Prevail from Synergistics Inc. in Cincinnati, and Act!, a simpler networked contact manager from Symantec Corp. in Cupertino, Calif.
Messink says IntellAgent's software was selected largely because it could be customized more extensively than the other products, so Domino's could adapt the software to its needs. IntellAgent Control is an interdepartmental customer-relationship management product designed to eliminate duplication of information and keep networked users informed o
f each customer's actions and plans.
The software provided a lot of functions, but that was a double-edged sword. "It was easier to tailor," Messink says, "but there's more for the users to learn. Programs that do a lot are more complicated to use." It helped that the product inherited much of its interface from Notes, which Messink had already rolled out to some Domino's users for a simple address-book application.
The company called in reseller MicroAge Inc. to help tailor the software. Because the relationship between Domino's and its franchisees includes both conversations and contracts, the system tracks interactions between field consultants and owners, and stores associated legal documents. Field consultants fill out the Contact Log record on a notebook computer after each visit, so when a franchisee calls headquarters, the franchise services staff can look at the individual's record, read the field consultant's notes, and access other related information.
Domino's rolled out the Contac
t Log on Compaq servers running Windows NT to regional offices early this year. The implementation hasn't been problem-free, though. Domino's faces a common problem with groupware implementations: getting people to use the system. It's effective only if both headquarters and field staff use it. But Domino's didn't have the resources to train all its users at once-so while field staff were trained by March, the 100 users of the system at headquarters weren't trained until May. That meant headquarters' use of the system lagged, which, in turn, hurt field staff's perception of the importance of entering data. Messink says most headquarters staff are getting up to speed, but that it could be six months to a year from the date of training before the system is fully exploited.
Getting field staff to use the system is also a challenge. Typically, says Lori Teichman, Domino's director of national franchise finance, field consultants are on the road a week at a time and may not have time to record all the informat
ion immediately after meeting a franchisee. "When they can't do it right away, the amount of time needed to do it accumulates to possibly daunting levels," she says.
But Teichman says people issues can also accelerate adoption of this kind of system. "Two weeks ago, the VP of franchise operations looked in the database for a contact both he and a field consultant are working with," she says. "When he didn't find the information, he called the field consultant to find out why it wasn't entered."
Teichman says that kind of interaction helped drive Domino's earlier adoption of E-mail. Together with the clear business need for the system, it could help Domino's achieve groupware success.
Technology Snapshot
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Domino's Pizza Inc.
Headquarters
Ann Arbor, Mich.
1996 revenue
$2.8 billion
Business goals
Improve internal communications for better franchise management
Key hardware
Various Compaq servers;
IBM ES/9000 mainframe and
System/36 midrange systems
Key software
Lotus Notes 4.5 and Domino;
IntellAgent Control sales automation package; Microsoft Windows NT 4.0; Novell NetWare 4.1 and UnixWare; Mayflower Sentinel
synchronization utility
DATA: Domino's Pizza
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omino's Pizza Inc. thinks communicating with franchisees is as important an ingredient for success as pesto or pepperoni. When a Domino's franchisee fails to meet corporate sales targets, for instance, Domino's staff must work closely with that franchisee to get sales back on track.
