World’s Largest Pizza Restaurant Franchise Chain ensures their ovens are churning out hot pizzas every time through enterprise mobility

The Challenge

As one of the largest pizza restaurant franchise chain in the world, this company depends on routine/preventive and emergency maintenance of its pizza ovens to ensure 100% uptime. Every minute an oven is non-operational represents lost revenue. Previously, getting repairs ordered and approved took 5 to 7 days, an unacceptably slow turnaround. To overcome this, store managers resorted to engaging local technicians to mitigate or reduce time-to-repair. Using third party personnel for repairs resulted in not utilizing the warranties and contracts with authorized vendors and this resulted in additional cost every time a local non-approved vendor was paid for maintenance and repair operations.

It was identified that the bottleneck was the lack of communications and slow response times from regional and store managers to corporate back-office and authorized vendors. Regional managers and store managers have the authority to approve work orders, yet both are routinely on the move. Furthermore, managers may not have a laptop readily available for receiving and processing work orders. When they do have access, approving a simple work order is a cumbersome process that includes connecting to a VPN and going through multiple screens full of extraneous data. The challenge was to provide a dedicated mobile solution for work order approval that was faster and simpler than the existing system.

The Solution

appsFreedom developed a mobile work order approval app on its award winning mobility platform that automatically sends a ticket to the appropriate store or regional manager on his mobile, who can immediately review the request and contact the appropriate vendor, unlike the previous scenario where it took days to get a work order approved. Once store employees create the work order in SAP, managers receive a notification via the app. The work order was simplified to show a short description of the problem followed by minimal but appropriate details like warranty information and repair history for that particular equipment enabling the manager to make an informed decision.

If the equipment is still under warranty, the manager can approve the work order and call the vendor directly from the app. Otherwise, the app produces a list of vendors authorized to repair that particular piece of equipment. The manager then forwards the details of the problem to a technician, who evaluates the issue and provides a quote. Finally, the manager approves the work order once the quote is approved upon. Rather than several days, the time taken to approve the repair order was reduced to a maximum of two days while under warranty repair orders are approved immediately. The app covers the entire work order processes to ensure that the tickets are assigned to the right vendor, purchase order approvals to implement the repairs are sent and finally the good receipt to acknowledge once the repairs are done. The app integrates with the client’s SAP backend systems, providing the management with real-time visibility into its equipment status.