The success of a franchise model for business growth depends on both the value of the solution being offered, but also on the efficiencies of the communication across the extended network of franchisees so that the lessons learned by all can effectively be communicated across the extended enterprise.

Providing a collaboration platform to enhance communication between the franchisees and the franchisor

Communication is at the heart of a franchise and the communication capabilities of Claromentis provides extensive functionality to assist in this area. Not only are core applications such as version controlled document management, news systems and content management centred on the provision of accurate and timely information, but many capabilities such as notifications and alerts ensure that users are kept informed of any changes by email, without having to log onto the portal.

Encouraging best practice and lesson learned environment between franchisees

Forums, News systems, FAQs, Blogs and even the Project management application can all be used to provide an excellent environment for the collaboration between franchisors and franchisees.

Making available version controlled product documentation

All franchisors make available product and service documentation, this knowledge of how a business should be run to deliver profits is in essence the value the franchise provides the franchisee.

By using a portal to provide automatic version control of documents and ensuring automatically that only the latest version of all information is found during searching the extended business can be sure that accurate information is always available as the products and services progress over time.

Minimising costs of information distribution

Costs of information distribution across wide geographies can be considerable, by making all information available in an audited, electronic information portal such costs are minimised.

Comprehensive news systems

The news systems of Claromentis provide for provision of news through entirely customisable permission based channels. In this way franchisees can subscribe to information that is of interest to their business, and franchisors can make available news for all franchisees irrespective of their own subscriptions.

E-forms for reporting issues and making requests

Electronic processes can be built by Claromentis Process Manager within the extranet to allow franchisees to report issues or make requests – such as ordering – to provide an auditable record of all such information. Reports will allow the franchisor to assess progress in these information flows so that they can look for trends in product issues, requests and anything else that is an important process to the business.

Providing consistent branding and marketing collateral

Having a central source of style guides and logos is important to a francise based business, to ensure that the brand is protected and deployed to guidelines at all times. This is facilitated in Claromentis by both the central document store and the Image Gallery applications.

Full multi-language

For those franchises that have a multi-language reach the portal is available in multi languages, with each user controlling the preferred language for the information. This also makes working with translation companies to provide the alternate language portal pages very simple and easy to manage.

Outstanding permission system

The permission system allows extranet areas, groups, roles and individual identities to control access to the information. This is completely suitable for franchisors, who often need to make available regional versions of documents and information, or distribute news to certain franchisees only.