customer:	ServiceMaster
business:	Service Franchise
timescale:	2005 to present
region:	Nationally
services:	eSP eProcurement Solution
locations:	400

Overview

ServiceMaster’s origins are in Chicago in 1929, when a former minor league baseball player, Marion E. Wade started a moth proofing company. Today ServiceMaster may be a Fortune 500 company, yet it still prides itself on its original ideals of integrity, responsibility, co-operation and mutual respect.

The UK Company celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2010, one of the most successful franchise operations in the UK with over 400 business owners across its four brands:

• ServiceMaster Clean
• Merry Maids
• Trugreen
• Furniture Medic

Client Need

It’s a challenge for any franchise to control brand and product consistency across a large franchise network. For the extremely successful ServiceMaster it means having to handle a complex range of operational and marketing collateral across four very different brands. This wasn’t easy and required a great deal of centralised administration.

Franchisees are not typically sales and marketing specialists, their knowledge and experience is normally within the service or product they provide. Ensuring the consistency of the brand identity across such a huge network was a constant battle with many of the franchisees not fully understanding how these brand identities should be used to their best advantage.

With all of these franchisees being owner operators, there was also the constant issue of managing the payment for these products.

Solution

To solve this ongoing operational problem, ServiceMaster contracted the services of a partner with knowledge of supplying eProcurement solutions to the franchise sector, besley & copp.

Following an initial audit that looked at the objectives of the company and the needs of the franchisee network, besley & copp built the fully branded; web based ‘ServiceMaster Marketing Resource’ powered by eSP our dynamic eProcurement tool.

The modular nature of eSP enables this eProcurement tool to be tailored to the clients specific needs as well as being a scalable platform that adapts to the changing needs of the business. The whole ServiceMaster network of over 400 franchisees now has one central resource for all operational print and marketing print, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world. A fast Internet connection is all that is needed.

This has empowered the individual franchisees, who now access a wide range of high quality marketing collateral which can be regionally personalised, yet stay on brand. The problem of payment has been solved by installing credit and debit card payment facility for franchisees.

In turn ServiceMaster as the franchisor, can control the use of the brand and the messaging used across each of the four branded networks. Because all marketing and operational print now comes from one central point, the company is guaranteed that the highest quality print is being used by its franchisees, while reducing the amount of stock that needs to be held.

And eSP’s scalable platform has already extended so that the ServiceMaster network can now access, not just operational and marketing print, but purchase an extended product range that includes uniforms and promotional gifts

Benefits

• De-centralise the ordering process
• Reduce central administration costs
• Aggregate costs across all four brands
• Improve reporting
• Ensured centralised brand control across 400 outlets

Testimonial

“ServiceMaster have worked with Besley & Copp for over 5 years now, we have always experienced superb customer service, on top of professional service, quality and value for money. It’s a pleasure to work with you!” Wendy Buck Administration Manager ServiceMaster

For further information on our knowledge of printing for the franchise sector, our eSP eProcurement solutions or to gain secure access to demo eSP yourself, please Click here or call one of our specialists on +44 (0)1392 477137