YUM Brands Inc Improves Franchisee Support with OneView from e-Docs UK

Yum Brands Inc

Yum! Brands, Inc., based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA is the world's largest restaurant company with more than 35,000 restaurants in more than 110 countries and territories. They include global brands such as KFC, Long John Silver's, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and generated more than $10 billion in total revenues, including company sales and franchise fees, in 2007.

The Challenge
Yum! Restaurants International has strong local teams operating in over 100 countries with established supply chains and around 600 international franchisees. In order to provide these franchisees with the highest levels of service, the company has made significant investments in systems and tools to improve marketing, operations consistency, product delivery, market planning and development, franchise support, and store-level team building capabilities.

As part of this process the company wanted to improve the way that documentation relating to each franchise including contracts, territory information, training details and delivery maps were handled at its UK-based headquarters in Woking, Surrey. In particular, it needed to streamline the whole document management process and deliver a more responsive service to franchisees by providing rapid access to all documents for staff operating in different time zones around the clock. This would also enable the company to meet business continuity planning requirements for the secure storage, access and management of legal documents.

The Solution
Yum! Restaurants International approached e-Docs UK to see if a bespoke, cost effective solution could be implemented to meet the specific requirements.

After an initial scoping phase, e-Docs UK proposed to implement it’s OneView, web ased document management system. This online repository provides an effective way of distributing information by giving staff rapid access to documents from any internet-enabled location, anywhere in the world. It eliminates the reliance on the time and availability of the central support team at Woking and enables them to be more productively deployed.

The first production phase of the project was to scan all documents that were currently being stored at Woking. A wide range of documents were processed including large format documents such as territory and delivery maps as well as more than 10,000 franchisee contract documents.

All scanning was completed in full colour ensuring that all documents can be viewed in the highest quality and, where required, printed in accordance with corporate branding and quality standards. OCR (optical character recognition) technology was also used to enable users to copy and paste information from stored documents. e-Docs UK also provided Yum! Restaurants International with desktop scanners to enable staff to scan, index and load documents directly into OneView

OneView is now the main data repository for the storage and retrieval of documents. It uses highly secure, mirrored web servers situated at two separate locations to provide the highest levels of service resilience and security. All hard copy documents are sent off-site for long term secure storage.

e-Docs UK provided bespoke, branded web pages including a flexible range of search fields for each franchise operation. These enable staff to quickly locate documents using store number, store name, document type, date and key words. All documents are stored as legally admissible PDFs.

According to Sarah Jane-Singh at Yum! Restaurants International: “e-Docs UK has provided us with an innovative and cost effective solution that is delivering significant time and cost savings across the organisation. It has enabled us to meet all regulatory and corporate requirements for the storage and management of data and is playing an important role in the delivery of higher levels of service to our franchisees.”