New Processes Speed Chain's Salon Openings

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April 17, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Great Clips Inc. is about a year away from wrapping up a four-year effort to overhaul and automate its business processes. Officials say the project is a key reason why the company has already been able to increase new store openings from 200 per year to 300.

The Minneapolis-based chain of 2,500 hair salons completed the first phase of the $1 million project in July 2005 by automating and streamlining what had been a 120-step process for opening a new salon.

This July, Great Clips IT developers will begin work on overhauling the business procedures used by managers to work with franchisees and existing salons. And at the beginning of next year, the company plans to launch the last phase of the project: re-engineering its contract management and communication processes.

The full project is slated to be completed in mid-2007.

"In our previous state, it was hard for management to be able to see the performance of the business processes -- to see into it and measure it," said Jim Waldo, vice president of IT at Great Clips. The company decided to automate its processes to give executives the visibility they need to manage them more proactively, he said.

That decision came after an internal analysis in 2003 determined that the company's procedures were preventing it from meeting growth plans.

The internal study found, among other things, that people in various steps in the process -- such as internal employees, real estate agents and contract managers -- had to spend significant time searching for information before handing it off to the next person in the chain.

Great Clips officials decided to automate its processes using Metastorm Inc.'s eWork business process management (BPM) suite and Interwoven Inc.'s MailSite Document Management suite. Meta-storm's BPM suite is designed to support design, integration and deployment of new internal procedures while integrating them into existing applications and systems.

For the first phase of the project, from July 2004 to July 2005, Great Clips developers used the Metastorm tool to automate and streamline the course of action for opening a new salon. Prior to completing the first phase, the 120-step process included eight specialized roles and 50 users.

Automation let Great Clips eliminate 20 of those steps. The most important result, Waldo said, was eliminating the steps that required people to wait for "days up to two weeks for information that was already in the building."

The project required significant effort from Great Clips developers working with the third-party tools, Waldo noted.

For instance, he said, the learning curve for Metastorm tools was steep. To make sure all the developers gained proficiency in the product, the company required that its entire development team first attend training as a group and then immediately begin work on a pilot project with limited scope and integration.

In addition, the developers had to make sure Interwoven's MailSite product -- which captures and stores content directly from Microsoft Outlook -- was tightly integrated with the desktop information manager.

Dennis Byron, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the ideal application of BPM tools is making communications with internal and external users -- such as business partners or suppliers -- easier. In addition, he noted that overhauling and automating business processes isn't trivial.

Timeline: A Business Automation Project

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