Franchise IT tech guy Todd Michaud wrote an very thoughtful piece on the overlooked issue of data collection and usage by the franchisor. He address the problems of the overt burden on franchisees to subsidize this data collection, and he exposes the fuzzy usage policies of the data. His recommended solution involves compromises in the data collection costs and also urges franchisors share the data and analysis back with the franchisee.
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At C2 Education, we’ve gone through a lot of growing pains implementing the right system for data collection – especially since we’re in a service industry and not a pure retail/food model. It’s really important that the IT system put in place works for the both the franchisor and franchisee and is not some sort of onerous process that results in mere busy work. For many niche industries there is no pre-packaged box that exists and to ram something generic down simply doesn’t make sense. As a potential franchisee, I would look at how strongly any of the IT correlates with the business process and how they ultimately drive production toward the bottom line. You can check out screen shots of our system at http://www.c2educate.com.