How to maintain brand continuity across multiple sites
Large organizations with multiple sites are always going to be concerned with the continuity of the brand. Is my store in Melbourne doing the same...
Franchisors all over Australia are looking for smarter ways of working during this time of reduced revenues and increased restrictions.
Franchisors all over Australia are looking for smarter ways of working during this time of reduced revenues and increased restrictions. Any opportunity to reduce face-to-face contact whilst improving quality control is very timely.
The Cheesecake Shop have been using Op Central’s compliance software to empower their 225 franchisees to conduct their own self-audits. The initiative was first pioneered by an internal team led by Managing Director Ken Rosebery in March 2019, as a way of improving quality control whilst reducing the number of costly field visits.
“Our franchisees receive a self-audit task from Op Central each week. They simply open Op Central’s audit form, answer our questions and attach photos so that we can assess what we see.” Ken Roseberry, Managing Director, The Cheesecake Shop.
“The whole process only takes a few minutes and it allows us to maintain the highest standards in cake presentation, covid-safe practices and anything else that we need to help our franchisees with.”
The system, which was developed by Op Central in collaboration with The Cheesecake Shop, can even be configured to force franchisees to take new photos for each audit, preventing them from re-using an old photo from their phone’s photo library.
“We've been self-auditing using Op Central for over a year now because it made business sense to save on site visits whilst improving quality control. Now with the additional need to reduce social contact, we expect it to become standard practice for franchisors." Ken Rosebery said.
Here's how you can use Audit Central for franchisee self-audits the same way as The Cheesecake Shop:
Step 1: Creating the self-audit checklist
- Create a new audit questionnaire
- Where possible, use the "file upload" question type to ensure that the franchisee attaches photos.
- Set the recurring frequency at weekly/monthly/quarterly depending on how regularly franchisees should complete this self-audit
- Assign the responsible auditing party as the 'Franchisee' role (instead of area manager)
Pro tip: In the questionnaire settings, toggle "Restrict File Upload To Camera" on, to ensure that franchisees don't upload old photos from their camera roll!
Step 2: Franchisee audit submissions
- Franchisee will be able to complete the entire process in a couple of minutes from their phone
- They will receive a task at the pre-determined recurring frequency
- They go through the audit form, answering questions, ticking boxes and uploading photos as they go
- Once they reach the end, they submit it through as a time and geo stamped recorded entry
Step 3: Reporting
- Results can be assessed using Audit Central's standard submission reporting functions
- Alternatively you can 'pull' these audit scores into a centralised reporting using Op Central's custom report builder. This also allows them to be separated by location, region, state, etc. or any other way you split your data.
If you'd like to see a live demo of Audit Central, press the Live Demo button at the top of this page and we'd be glad to walk you through it.
