Enduring Technology
First Place:
Tell Us About Us Knowledge Management Console
California-based chicken chain El Pollo Loco needed a better way to harness customer feedback. The company began working with customer-intelligence solution provider Tell Us About Us to solicit customer feedback in 2004, and since then it adopted a number of the company’s solutions. They included online and phone Customer Experience Surveying, customer concern collecting, and order taking for catering.
Each service provides the chain with a host of information to improve operations, but data is only worthwhile if you have the ability to process it. To help clients manage the information from its applications, Tell Us About Us developed the Online Knowledge Management Console (KMC). This Web-based reporting platform gathers data from the various sources to create and modify reports for management.
“Real-time data flows into it, and [the user] can slice and dice the data by region, manager, or district,” says Bob Cavanaugh, vice president of operations for Tell Us About Us. The OnlineKMC instantly notifies users via phone, fax, or e-mail when an action is required.
“We can download each and every report that is online into Excel to play with numbers or schedule it to send out by e-mail,” Cavanaugh says.
Second Place:
Tim Hortons Tim Trac
In any given year, Ontario, Canada–based coffee and doughnuts chain Tim Hortons is involved in as many as 400 building projects. That means architects, project managers, engineers, and other players have to be provided with blueprints, budget sheets, and a host of other documents to keep them in the loop.
“We would spend close to $300,000 just on blueprinting,” says Dan Dominick, vice president of engineering, construction, and design for the company.
The chain was also using 6,000 square feet of real estate to store about 3,000 files from projects dating as far back as 1964. There had to be a better way.
In 2004, the company turned to Expesite, a provider of project management software for multiunit construction projects, to create Tim Trac, an online collaboration and communication platform that allows Tim Hortons associates to interact with third-party partners throughout the real estate and construction processes. Blueprints and other documents can be uploaded to the system and accessed online by anyone involved, depending on their security status.
“We’ve got 200 or 300 users all plugging into a platform online anywhere in the world to manage projects and receive information,” Dominick says. “One person could have 25 projects that they’re seeing at any given time on their dashboard screen.”
He says it took close to four years to develop the system properly, and buy-in wasn’t easy.
“We did a top-down mandate,” Dominick says. “There’s no other way to do it.”
The chain relied on regional “champions,” or users who understood and were passionate about the system, to train others. Dominick estimates the program saves $50,000 per year in blueprinting, not to mention other administration costs. The chain also uploaded into the system project files dating back to their first store.
“Now you’ve got an electronic library of projects since the day you started,” Dominick says. “That is cool.”