Ace Hardware Shifts BI Tools After Early Struggles

Franchisees Have Healthy Sense of Skepticism When There Is Past Failure

The challenge for a retail franchisee is to be able to manage thousands of different inventory and a highly complex supply chain at the store level easily and without a huge team of supply managers. Ace Hardware Corp. has been trying to build a business intelligence (BI) tool to do just that. And it hasn't been easy. 

Ace has replaced an inflexible BI tool used by about 3,000 workers, which in turn had replaced an older version that wasn't doing the necessary job.

Hopefully, three times a charm. Ace Hardware plans to replace the inflexible system with WebFocus, which will eventually be used by 10,000 internal users, partners, suppliers and customers.

Impressive. So what has this to do with being a franchisee?

Think Guinea Pig.

Brian Cook, software engineering consultant of IT at Ace, elaborates:

"The biggest [challenge] may be to convince users of the old system that the new one will work as promised."

Uh-huh. And why are franchisees cynical about the new BI tool?

“The system as a whole in the past has gotten a bad rap (because) we were unable to deliver on some projects and had some high profile failures,” he said.

Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute in Seattle, agreed that winning back users who have been burned in previous BI projects (at Ace) is a difficult task. [via ComputerWorld]

A franchisee can take a lesson in using new software from the old Life cereal commercial, in which two brothers have little Mikey test the cereal (click the video below to see).

There is a weakness for franchisors to allow the boldest, technical savvy franchisees to self-select in; namely, the corporation may launch a software that the geeks love but that is far too complex for most users. Apparently, this happens quite a bit.

"Wayne Eckerson suggests that companies let a true cross section of users select BI tools instead of “the most outspoken users who tend to be power users” and likely will select tools too complex for most users."

The IT challenge for the corporate office is to incentivize a wide but manageable test team that includes little Mikey to make sure that everyone will like it. For a busy franchisee, there is wisdom in waiting to see if little Mikey, the smallest and simplest of the kids, likes it first.