Maintenance software for franchises: who reports, who answers for it and what head office sees

One outlet, two owners

Two interests live side by side in a franchised network. The franchisee runs the outlet, hires the staff and, as a rule, bears the day-to-day repairs. The franchisor brings the brand, the manual and, often, a list of suppliers it has negotiated with for the whole network. Who takes on what is set by each brand's franchise agreement, and no two are alike: what follows describes what is common, not a rule.

The upshot is that one and the same fault can take three routes. The shutter that will not go up is a matter for the franchisee and their locksmith. The oven or coffee machine the brand requires goes to the service firm named in the manual. And the sign on the shopfront, which is brand image, matters to head office even if a local installer repairs it. The manager who opens at eight knows none of this: she knows something is not working and there is a queue.

What breaks, who sees it and whose it is

Look at the second column: in nearly every row the report comes from someone in the outlet, on split shifts, short contracts and little time in the job. A product that asks that person for a login and a training course is not going to be used in outlet thirty-seven.

Suppliers by region and brand standards

A network of forty outlets in six provinces does not have a technician: it has forty address books. Some brands approve a national supplier for whatever affects the product (the machinery, the sign, the furniture) and leave the rest to the franchisee. Others have area technicians covering several provinces. Either way, the product has to let the routing be defined outlet by outlet, because the plumber in Vigo is not the one in Murcia.

Brand standards are the other front. Head office worries less about the bill for a shutter than about how long an outlet spends with its shopfront dark or its air conditioning broken in the middle of a campaign. To watch that it needs a figure that compares across outlets: when it was known, when someone took charge and when it was closed. If each franchisee records it their own way, or not at all, no comparison is possible. What Spanish law asks of premises open to the public, and what falls to the franchisor before signing, is in regulations for retail premises.

Six questions that separate an outlet tool from a network tool

• Is the account the outlet's or the network's? The answer decides who signs up, who sees the data and what happens when a franchisee leaves the brand.
• Does head office see every outlet on one screen? If that is what you need, ask to be shown it with twenty outlets loaded, not two. If you do not need it, do not carry it.
• Who sets the categories and the deadlines? For the data to compare, “shutter”, “sign” and “air conditioning” have to be called the same in every outlet.
• Can each outlet have its own technicians? The national supplier for the machinery and the neighbourhood electrician for the rest, in the same routing.
• What does the shop assistant who started on Monday have to learn? If the answer takes more than a minute, in three months nobody will be reporting.
• How does the data come out? In what format, with which columns and whether the franchisee can hand it to head office without go-betweens.

When a network platform is what you need

There are networks for which the right choice is multi-site maintenance software, of the kind described in CMMS and in maintenance software for shops. These are the ones:

• Head office manages maintenance for every outlet, company-owned or franchised, with framework contracts and a team that hands out the work.
• Management wants a dashboard with the whole network: outlets ranked by times, by area or by supplier, without stitching sheets together.
• There is costly, repeated machinery (kitchens, refrigeration, laundry) and you want its history per unit, with spares and costs.
• Brand-image audits and faults have to live in the same place.

And there are networks, plenty of them, where that is too much: head office repairs nothing, each franchisee gets organised with their own technicians and all that is asked is that reports do not get lost and that everyone leaves the same trail. For a franchisee with one, three or five outlets, a network platform is a suit several sizes too big. The small version of that kind of product is reviewed in CMMS for small businesses.

Bedel in a franchise: outlet by outlet, and said clearly

Let us start with what there is not. In Bedel each outlet is one account, with its own WhatsApp number, its list of people, its technicians and its Excel file. There is no dashboard where the franchisor sees the entire network, no ranking of outlets and no view by area. Bedel is not a CMMS and not a network platform. If head office needs that screen, a different kind of product is the right one, and we would rather you knew it here than in the third meeting.

What it does achieve is that every outlet reports in the same way. The manager writes a line to her outlet's number, sends a photo of the crooked shutter or records a voice note. Bedel creates the ticket with a number and a time and sends it to the technician that outlet has assigned to that category, whether the franchisee's locksmith or the brand's official service. The technician replies from their WhatsApp, with nothing to install. The manager gets one message when the ticket is accepted and another when it is closed. Whatever the outlet has marked as urgent, losing power for instance, rings the on-call mobile at whatever hour, and a ticket that runs out of time goes up to the person named: the franchisee, or the area manager if that is what you agree.

Each outlet downloads its Excel file, and all the files have the same columns: time of the report, time it was accepted and time it was closed. If in each outlet's set-up session you put in the same categories and the same deadlines, the sheets can be pasted one under another and added up by hand. It is manual work, and we are not going to call it anything else. On top of that, whoever runs maintenance at each outlet receives once a month, on WhatsApp, the reminder of dated inspections.

Nor does it hold a machine inventory or orders with materials and costs, it does not store certificates, it does not link to head office's system and it does not take reports from customers: the people on the outlet's list do the writing. Data is hosted in the European Union. The product page is incidents in franchises; the general one, incident management on WhatsApp; and if your concern is mostly repairing what breaks, corrective maintenance software will be useful.