STORES Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 92)

NUTS AND BOLTS / COMMUNICATIONS La Solution Parfaite Smartphones improve efficiency of Au Bon Pain district managers BY CRAIG GUILLOT rom the artisan breads on its shelves to the soups and sandwiches prepared behind the counter, Au Bon Pain has numerous operations and items to monitor at its 220 locations. The company measures success not just by SKU counts, but in food preparation and customer satisfaction. By putting real-time information literally on the hips of district managers in the form of mobile devices, Au Bon Pain has seen instant improvements in operations. F The Boston-based chain relies on a team of area directors who visit cafes to ensure that sales are reaching goals and that inventory and service expectations are being met. Area directors assess a cafe’s performance through a variety of metrics that they then compare and measure against company standards. One of the most important pieces of information for the area directors is the daily P&L statement. In the past, Au Bon Pain administrators would crunch the Smartphones will account for 31% of the mobile handset market by 2013 Source: ABI Research upon to do anything from helping resolve a customer complaint to handling employee relations issues. When it comes to analyzing the performance of each store, access to data is critical: the harder they have to work to find it, the less time they have to devote to their primary roles. “They’ve got so many things to deal with,” says Ed Mockler, senior vice president of IT for Au Bon Pain. “So many things can come up at any point in time in the cafe. The last thing they need to do is have to deal with administrative tasks” or be tied down to a laptop. Laptops added mobility to PC capabilities, and devices like smartphones and BlackBerry devices can take it even further. With them, area directors can roam about the cafe, multi-task and still have access to critical information and P&L reports. “By putting all the reports onto a mobile platform and onto a device that is on the hip, it gives them a lot of flexibility,” Mockler says. To facilitate the use of mobile devices in the field, Au Bon Pain enlisted Enterprise Mobile, a Massachusetts-based company focused on driving faster, improved and more cost-effective implementation of Windows Mobile-based messaging and applications. Au Bon Pain had “a good sense of the information that the field manager needed to know,” says Enterprise Mobile CEO Mort Rosenthal, “but the next step was to put that together, deploy it and manage it.” Pilot program launch Au Bon Pain assigned devices to 10 area directors and administrators in December 2007. The company used the P&L application for the pilot mobility program, Mockler says, because it was an important and daily function that would allow users to quickly learn through experience. Half of the pilot participants received Palm Treos; the other half got Motorola Qs. Au Bon Pain instituted training classes for both the operation of the devices and running the programs reWWW.STORES.ORG numbers overnight, and area directors would print the reports early the following morning before leaving their home offices. Laptops took mobility a step further, but still required area directors to sit in 92 STORES / MAY 2008 one particular location while they accessed information. Often called upon to move about the cafe or make an unexpected visit to another location, area managers ultimately needed to have information and reports at their fingertips on a moment’s notice. Each area director oversees anywhere from six to 10 stores and can be called http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - May 2008

Stores - May 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Contrasting C-Level Compensation Across Segments What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story: Concepts That Clicked Concept2Watch Kiosks Artificial Intelligence Tech Support Online LPinformation Data Synchronization Human Resources Site Selection POS Selection Communications Biometrics Networking Systems Credit Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - May 2008

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