The Wheel Specialist business started life in Birmingham under the company name of Lap-Tap Ltd and has been established for over 50 years. The company has a long-standing reputation for its service, quality, and fast turnaround times. Now nationwide, The Wheel Specialist can offer customers a professional and complete service, delivered locally and to the highest quality and customer care standards.
The Wheel Specialist provides customers with the ability to transform the look of their car by giving worn, corroded and damaged wheels a complete refurbishment. They also provide a wide look of colours and finishes to make each car unique.
In order for The Wheel Specialist to continue to expand it was important for them to get away from the time-consuming manual paperwork that running a growing franchise network can entail. Instead, they wanted a system that could generate consistently priced, professional customer invoices and then use those invoices to automatically calculate management service fees with minimal effort. Most of all, The Wheel Specialist knew the system had to be extremely simple to use in order for their franchisees to see it as a benefit, not a burden.
As with most franchisors, visibility across the franchisee network was critical to The Wheel Specialist, allowing them to monitor their franchisees and offer advice where necessary. To do this, they needed a system that allowed their head office to view data for the entire franchise network, whilst only showing franchisees their own data.
The Wheel Specialist wanted the system to let everyone in the company see the key financial information, metrics and resources, wherever they were. This would enable both head office and their franchisees to be able to see resource availability, job schedules and key metrics whether they were in the office or out on a job – allowing customer enquiries to be quickly and accurately resolved.
Ginny Muprhy, Director of Operations at The Wheel Specialist, was referred to GreyRidge Software by a franchise consultant, where she then found out more about Franchise 360 – a software product designed by GreyRidge specifically for the franchise market. After initial discussions with Ginny, GreyRidge sent one of their analysts to the company to understand the core processes underlying their business. Ginny found that unlike boxed systems she had looked at, Franchise 360 contained all the core functionality needed to manage the business and deliver services to franchises and customers, but could be tailored to fit the business like a glove.
As Franchise 360 re-used generic components, it allowed GreyRidge’s developers to focus on tailoring the software to the areas that made the franchise unique – ensuring they ended up with business software which fitted their company perfectly and provided a high return on investment.
Once the analyst understood The Wheel Specialist’s requirements, the basic scope was documented and signed off by Ginny and the requirements were turned into a plan for modifying the software. GreyRidge provided a quote based on this basic scope, but made it clear that Ginny would have feedback and visibility of the development process, with the ability to make any minor modifications she wished within the overall scope without additional charge.
A prototype system was provided to The Wheel Specialist to allow them to provide input into the development of their system. As each section of the project was completed, it was reviewed with Ginny and other end users, and their feedback was incorporated into the system before the area was signed off.
The developers of Franchise 360 worked in concert with the end users of each area of the system, ensuring that each section was designed around their needs and reflected their day to day workflow. The system was designed from day one to be simple and user-friendly so that all members of staff could pick it up quickly and use the system on a daily basis without needing a high level of IT knowledge.
The completed system was tailored to facilitate each of The Wheel Specialist’s core business processes and was signed off and finished after just 2 months. At the end of the process, GreyRidge sent one of the development team who had worked on the product to train the entire company so that they were proficient in every area of their system.
As The Wheel Specialist have become more and more comfortable with the system over the years, they have been able to ask for changes to the system in order to streamline the administration of their business even further.
Whenever The Wheel Specialist have come to GreyRidge with suggestions, the developers have always been on hand to suggest new ways to improve and automate their processes, answer questions from the end users or to make minor modifications to the system to simplify things even further.
When Ginny was introduced to Franchise 360, she was thoroughly impressed that she could have a system which was built for and around her company, without it costing her the earth. Since the system was built specifically for the company, it could mirror the specific day to day tasks in her business, ensuring it helped reduce the amount of manual administration required whilst providing a high return on investment. Franchise 360 has helped The Wheel Specialist to automate many of the key areas of their business and to provide a professional first impression to potential customers. The Franchise 360 system integrates directly into The Wheel’s Specialist’s website, enabling full quotes to be generated by potential customers straight off the website, using the standard pricing defined by head office. All quotes are sent automatically by email and branded with The Wheel Specialist corporate logo and can even have conditional discounts based on marketing campaigns they have defined.
These quotes are automatically stored by Franchise 360 and assigned to the relevant franchisee, depending on postcode, meaning the leads can be serviced quickly and effortlessly. The quotes were also customised to include wheel specific options, which allow consistently priced quotes to be generated across the whole franchise network by simply selecting from a menu of services and options defined by head office – making life extremely easy for the franchisees and the end customers. Once the quote becomes a sale, Franchise 360 allows the quote to be automatically converted to an invoice without re-entering the data, and the finished invoices are used to automatically generate the monthly service fee invoices – all without any manual calculation or intervention.
The Wheel Specialist now have a system they feel truly comfortable with – one which is easy to use on a day to day basis, which can be quickly adapted as their business grows, is cost effective and has saved Ginny and her franchisees a great deal of time and money through streamlining of their core processes.
The Wheel Specialist feel they have found a true technology partner – a software provider that works with them to help their business to develop, adapt and become more efficient. By allowing GreyRidge to provide them with the technological advantage they needed, Ginny has been able to focus on expanding the business rather than on mundane day to day tasks.
“Franchise 360 gives new franchisees the confidence to join our team by eliminating the amount of daily tasks that need to be undertaken and giving them ultimate security. Franchise 360 helps our company look credible and more professional by handling our leads from our website, giving us time to concentrate on other activities that can drive our business forward.”
