BY placing more information at the fingertips of both franchisees and their clients, Suds Laundry and Dry Cleaning’s Caloy Ang hopes to bring unprecedented efficiency to the laundry business, a franchise category favored by first-time entrepreneurs.
Suds’s 30 stores in Luzon and Cebu City are set to adopt an enterprise-wide program by year-end that integrates data from daily transactions to give the franchisee a firm idea in minutes of how the business is performing. It is now being tested in four stores in Metro Manila. The same system, likewise, tracks a client’s dealings with Suds to reward customer loyalty with free services or discounts, to allow customer feedback and even to tell him at exactly what time his laundry will be ready for pickup at the store.
Best of all, says Ang, founder and managing director of Suds, the program that makes use of cloud computing can be accessed through a tablet and an affordable monthly subscription from Slingshot, a spinoff company of Suds and Ideyatech. Ideyatech is a premier software-development company that specializes in cloud and mobile technologies, and services both local and global clients. This saves the franchisee from the thousands needed to buy a point-of-sales system and other expensive hardware and applications currently favored by businesses.
“A plain vanilla tablet” that sells for a fraction of the cost of a regular computer enables a franchisor to see—even when he is on vacation—the volume of transactions and sales per day, most-frequently-
bought services, and even the amount of supplies used. Because 48 percent of gross sales go to the cost of laundry supplies, monitoring the latter is a key step to managing a profitable Suds franchise. In addition, the digital trail recorded by the system serves as a deterrent to pilferage, which, in the laundry business, takes the form of undeclared services.
On the client side, all Suds customers by year-end will be able to monitor their transactions and rewards online by downloading a mobile app. With the help of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, they will also be able to know where in the laundry cycle their clothes are. Moreover, RFID tags will also help store personnel minimize missing items, the bane of any laundry operator.
“Our customers have always taken note of previous industry innovations introduced by Suds, like uncluttered, air-conditioned stores and digitized transactions. Our new program will give them greater access to information when they want it,” according to Ang. “This innovation will allow both clients and franchisees to better manage what matter to them.”
Ang discloses that with the help of Allan Tan, CEO of Ideyatech and cofounder of the new system, Slingshot will eventually become available to other entrepreneurs in other industries and services. “We will be creating programs for restaurants, food carts and other segments that will prove to be cost effective because it can be accessed through a tablet. We’re changing the game, so that people can manage their businesses more efficiently and quickly,” Ang says.
The founder of Suds recalls when in the predigital era it would take him three days to crunch numbers from a month’s worth of transactions. “Poor record keeping and lack of planning need no longer be one of the main causes of business failure with the introduction of an affordable enterprise-wide system,” he says. A small business owner with the ability to easily track his performance on a daily basis against established benchmarks will have time to launch corrective programs.
Now catering to a customer base of 80,000, Ang is optimistic that by the end of the year that number will grow to 120,000 with the help of its new custom-made program.