Thank you for wanting to learn more about us. Download the PDF
here.
To stay updated with our latest content, please follow us on LinkedIn.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Service Industry

Scaling Insights:

A Business Intelligence Solution

for Franchise Ecosystems

Services Rendered

Product Design

Software Development

Product Architecture

Tech stack

AWS, React, Material UI, Tailwind CSS, Zustand, FastAPI, Python, Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions, Amazon SQS, Kafka, Webhook, AWS Cognito, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, GitHub Actions, Elastic Beanstalk, Merge, Karate, Postman, Cypress, Plotly, Sentry, Figma

Sales, accounting, and third-party customer data in service-based franchises, such as restaurants and car washes, exist in disparate systems. Site managers and decision makers manually unify this data to gain actionable insights. The process becomes lengthy, highly inaccurate, and demands high labor costs. We launched a platform that reconciles data from point of sale (POS) systems and accounting systems for financial and operational oversight and insights.

Franchisees are often operated as small businesses, sometimes with multiple units. In fact, 54% of all franchises are multi-unit operations, with 43,212 multi-unit operators controlling more than 223,213 franchise units in the U.S. More specifically, 90% of car washes are small businesses. It isn’t feasible for operators to build such solutions in-house. Therefore, chains (restaurants, car washes, supermarkets) have an opportunity to empower their operators and teams with better insights using a data unification and business intelligence solution like this one.

iNDUSTRY CHALLENGE

According to Gartner, data silos cost companies up to $15M every year

For franchisee operators, a disconnect between POS and accounting systems increases manual interventions and delays insight realizations. This leads to increased operational costs and sometimes financial losses. With artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) leading the way for organizations worldwide, chains cannot afford these kinds of silos and delays.

Zemoso Labs Partnership Challenge

Zemoso collaborates with Chief Technology Offices (CTO) and Chief Product Offices (CPO) to build and launch the data unification and business intelligence platform, -1 to 1. In this early-stage initiative, our customer aligned on what the solution should do, developed the product/feature roadmap, and gained early customer commitment. Most fundamentally, we helped them gain alignment across the business problem, user problem, and solution, quickly and iteratively.

Impact created

Franchisee operators reduced manual data merging and analysis expenses by 90%. They reported near-excellent model accuracy for their CFO and accounting reporting. Operators also saw a 98% decrease in time spent on data reconciliation and a 48X increase in the speed of insight generation.

What are our clients saying?

Our clients love what we do:

How did we do this?

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5
Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Block quote

Ordered list

  1. Item 1
  2. Item 2
  3. Item 3

Unordered list

  • Item A
  • Item B
  • Item C
Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

Superscript

Subscript

The customer started this journey with “Connect the Dots”, a unique program designed for CPOs and innovation leaders to visualize the product's end success state in two weeks with a design prototype. After that, the product and engineering team delivered a product roadmap for minimum viable product (MVP), architecture decision records (ADRs), and a technology proof of concept (POC) in about six weeks. Our customer started early testing with prospects and partners using the design and tech POCs. As a result, they quickly garnered business confidence and traction, moving into MVP deployment and expansion.

The solution

The product operates as a platform that integrates and pulls data from multiple POS systems, such as Merchant One, Sonny’s and DRB, and accounting software, such as Quickbooks and Netsuite. The connections expose data from these systems to complete analysis and surface insights. The core workflow is enabled by Apache Airflow and https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/AWS Step Functions.

Solution highlights

An intuitive frontend

One of the core requirements for our customer was to build a solution that anyone could use, even someone with no technical knowledge or even partial business knowledge. The intuitive frontend was developed using React. Zustand handles state management, and Material UI Library and Tailwind CSS handle styling. The detailed dashboards surface near real-time insights for 30+ key performance indicators (KPIs), giving site managers and operational managers of different units visibility over transactions, labor costs, labor costs per hour, and more. This data can easily be sliced, diced, and analyzed by locations, different times, and other factors. Plotly generates the graphs, while Amazon Redshift and Python run the analytics workflow.

A robust ETL workflow

Whether you are exposing POS or accounting team data via an Application Programming Interface (API), or batch transfers from a database, an automated rules engine analyzes, maps, and organizes the data to ensure cohesiveness within the platform. Apache Airflow handles the entire extract, transform, load (ETL) workflow with scheduled jobs running at regular intervals (e.g., every half hour or every three hours) to sync data between client and server systems. The backfill process pulls historical data using an inbuilt feature in Airflow. A Python-based rules engine classifies transactions (e.g., identifying new membership sales).

Data Management and Syncing

Amazon Redshift stores and manages the sales and accounting data. It provides a powerful tool to run aggregation queries and scales easily. We used their multi-tenant storage pattern, specifically the bridge model, to store each customer’s data in individual schemas within a single database. This centralized the ETL workflow and ensured data privacy without duplicating resources. PostgreSQL manages users and their operational data.

Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka enable real-time synchronization. SQS provides flexibility for timely updates to POS data, while Kafka handles event-driven synchronization for continuous data flow. Synchronization schedules were tailored to customer needs, with a default frequency of once per hour.

The Fundamentals

Data integrations and workflows sometimes depended on specific automations that enabled batch processing and such, and we built Sentry into the platform to ensure alerts for job failures were caught. Karate and Postman automate API testing, and Cypress handles UI testing. GitHub Actions are used for Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD). We used Elastic Beanstalk for APIs for easy deployment and management. FastAPI bridges the backend and frontend, streamlining data flow.

How did Zemoso deliver excellence?

An agile engineering, design, and product team collaborated closely with the customer’s internal team, self-organizing on priorities and staying accountable for iterative, accelerated delivery. By leveraging a mix of near-shore and off-shore resources, we provided round-the-clock support, enabling our customer to launch much faster. To learn more about our Connect the Dots program or our engagement models, please fill out our form here.

P.S. We have strict Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with many of our clients. The data, insights, and capabilities discussed in this case study have been anonymized to protect our client’s identity and don’t include any proprietary information.

CASE STUDIES

We help you convert great ideas

Initiatives : All
Strategy & design
New product development
Product expansion
Initiatives : All
New product development
Strategy & design
Product modernization
Initiatives : All
Strategy & design
New product development

Got an idea?

Together, we’ll build it into a great product

Follow us on

©2024 Zemoso Technologies. All rights reserved.