7-Eleven opens communications with franchisees
The convenience store giant is enabling field employees to provide franchise locations with better corporate data.
7-Eleven Inc. relies on its team of field employees to serve as a connection between corporate headquarters and franchise stores. The company is now equipping field employees with Microsoft Surface tablet devices running Microsoft 365 and Power BI to provide franchisees with enhanced insight from corporate into their store's performance, purchase trends, and other critical business data.
Power BI dashboards help field employees to spot trends and visualize insights from POS data stored and analyzed using the cloud-based Microsoft Azure Data Lake and Azure SQL data warehouse platforms. This enables them to recommend actions to franchisees which are designed to boost sales and ensure the right products are stocked to meet customer demand.
Field employees can also use the Surface camera to take a picture of the schematics of the store, helping identify differences from the planogram that franchisees can use to analyze sales opportunities. Utilizing the Microsoft OneDrive file hosting and synchronization service, they can obtain real-time access to corporate assets, with the Microsoft Intune enterprise mobility management tool providing security.
7-Eleven is also migrating its infrastructure to Azure, and already leveraging technologies like Azure artificial intelligence (AI) services into its 7Now delivery app to provide personalized recommendations to customers based on a variety of factors. The retailer plans to continue to deploy Azure technologies such as AI, data analytics, and blockchain.
"Franchisees have a significant role to play in our transformation, and empowering them with the right information is critical," said Gurmeet Singh, 7-Eleven executive VP and chief digital, information and marketing officer. “Our collaboration with Microsoft enables us to get data out to franchisees through our field employees that they can use to make better business decisions.”
7-Eleven Inc. relies on its team of field employees to serve as a connection between corporate headquarters and franchise stores. The company is now equipping field employees with Microsoft Surface tablet devices running Microsoft 365 and Power BI to provide franchisees with enhanced insight from corporate into their store's performance, purchase trends, and other critical business data.
Power BI dashboards help field employees to spot trends and visualize insights from POS data stored and analyzed using the cloud-based Microsoft Azure Data Lake and Azure SQL data warehouse platforms. This enables them to recommend actions to franchisees which are designed to boost sales and ensure the right products are stocked to meet customer demand.
Field employees can also use the Surface camera to take a picture of the schematics of the store, helping identify differences from the planogram that franchisees can use to analyze sales opportunities. Utilizing the Microsoft OneDrive file hosting and synchronization service, they can obtain real-time access to corporate assets, with the Microsoft Intune enterprise mobility management tool providing security.
7-Eleven is also migrating its infrastructure to Azure, and already leveraging technologies like Azure artificial intelligence (AI) services into its 7Now delivery app to provide personalized recommendations to customers based on a variety of factors. The retailer plans to continue to deploy Azure technologies such as AI, data analytics, and blockchain.
"Franchisees have a significant role to play in our transformation, and empowering them with the right information is critical," said Gurmeet Singh, 7-Eleven executive VP and chief digital, information and marketing officer. “Our collaboration with Microsoft enables us to get data out to franchisees through our field employees that they can use to make better business decisions.”