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For 25 years, Great Clips Inc. has been expanding its chain of hair salons, opening a grand total of 2,600 "no appointment" locations in the U.S. That's something like 100 new Great Clips salons each year. Disparate database systems and redundant business processes followed. In 2004 it took about 14 weeks and 120 different steps to open a new outlet.
"The data integration was just not there," says CIO Kathy Wetzel, who arrived at Great Clips about eight months ago, after the company had contracted with Jim Waldo of AVT Consulting LLC to streamline business operations.
Waldo chose Metastorm Inc.'s business process management (BPM) software from an initial field of about 12 vendors in Gartner Inc.'s Magic Quadrant. The software includes analytics, a simulation capability and an integration manager. Metastorm also beat out the competition because the BPM software can track projects over many months.
Today, Great Clips has consolidated 35 databases into four and eliminated 40 hours of paper-based analysis each month, Wetzel says. "What I hear people say now is that information is at their fingertips," she says. "Before now, it was in a database or Excel sheet, and it was hard to get to."
Wetzel and Waldo are still working on the $1.2-million, four-year project. So far, it has cut two weeks and 25 steps out of the process of opening new franchises and has freed staff members to focus on branding.
Problem solved.
Anne McCrory is editorial director of CIO Decisions and the CIO Decisions conference. Write to her at amccrory@ciodecisions.com.
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