Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
Customer Solution Case Study
Specialty Retailer Smoothes Operations for Improved Productivity and Future Profits
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Retail—Specialty retail
Customer Profile
Emeryville, California–based Jamba Juice provides real-­fruit smoothies, meals, and snacks. Jamba Juice has more than 700 stores, more than 500 of which are company-­owned and operated. Business Situation
Jamba Juice needed to streamline its processes and provide enhanced communication capabilities to help store and regional managers be more efficient, thus boosting profitability.
Solution
The company signed a Microsoft® Enterprise Client Access License Suite agreement and deployed products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for improved workflow processes and communication.
Benefits
Greater employee productivity
Improved business intelligence
Reduced costs
Increased sales
“Compiling and distributing accurate, up-­to-­date information through our integrated Microsoft environment … will help Jamba Juice take steps that ensure greater overall profitability.”
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information Technology, Jamba Juice
Jamba Juice—a leading provider of healthy, on-­the-­go food and beverages—viewed the economic slowdown as an opportunity to assess its operations and improve efficiencies. The company decided to invest in integrated technology tools that would help its stores run more efficiently and streamline communication. Therefore, Jamba Juice signed a Microsoft® Enterprise Client Access License Suite agreement, saving 50 percent in software costs, and deployed products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007. The company already has seen improvements in its productivity, and it expects to enhance its business intelligence capabilities for better decision making. Overall, Jamba Juice anticipates that its use of Microsoft products will result in increased profitability due to a better ability to serve customers and decreased operational costs.
Situation
Jamba Juice provides real-­fruit smoothies and other healthy snacks for hungry customers throughout the United States. The company has enjoyed constant steady growth and is working toward a goal of increasing its store count. As of March 2009, Jamba Juice has more than 700 stores, more than 500 of which are company-­owned, with the remainder owned by franchisees. Some Jamba Juice stores are located in traditional shopping areas, while others are embedded in grocery stores and airports.
The economic downturn caused the company to slow its growth, reconsider its processes, and look for efficiencies, with the idea that these measures would poise Jamba Juice for success upon an economic upswing. Company decision makers viewed embracing newer technology across Jamba Juice stores as a way to support increased productivity and, ultimately, profitability. “Store managers in particular face aggressive sales goals, which are especially difficult to deliver on in today’s tough business climate,” says Jeff Weinstein, Director of Operations Development for Jamba Juice. “And they’ve sometimes had to work to achieve those goals without the technology resources that would help them.”
Store managers at Jamba Juice historically have had trouble finding the information that they needed to effectively run their stores. The company maintained what it called an “originals” folder on the companywide shared network drive. This folder contained more than 1,000 documents that store managers needed access to in order to manage the business;; everything from equipment manuals and store directories to tax information forms and marketing guides could be found in the originals folder. Every week or two, Jamba Juice corporate employees would push out necessary information to the field by placing it into the originals folder. “It was a cumbersome, unreliable process with no version control,” says Weinstein. “Managers struggled to wade through all the data and had no way of knowing if the document they found was the most accurate and up-­to-­date.” The Need for Business Intelligence
Store managers also struggled to find the time to manually update their stores’ profit-­
and-­loss and other key information that their district and regional managers needed. Store managers had to spend at least one to two hours each week gathering and typing in data that Jamba Juice wanted for business intelligence and analysis purposes. Even when the information was in the Jamba Juice system, employees were uncertain about the integrity of the data gathered because of conflicting sets of metrics between store and corporate resources. Gathering business intelligence on a corporate level—about everything from a particular smoothie flavor’s popularity to regional sales trends—was made more difficult because of the mix of company-­
owned and franchise stores. “Things get complicated when you’ve got a mix of store ownership and therefore a mix of technologies,” explains Robert Notte, Vice President of Information Technology for Jamba Juice. “But it’s critically important to conduct data analysis to discern trends and determine how to address and make the most of the customer behavior patterns we see. That kind of business intelligence can inform our marketing decisions—such as promoting certain menu items in certain markets and/or during a specific time period, thus enabling us to be more strategic in our overall sales and marketing efforts.”
Inefficient Communications
Jamba Juice also saw room for improvement in the communications between its corporate offices and field stores. For example, Jamba Juice offers catering services for organizations such as schools or businesses that may want a large number of smoothies for a special event. “But our stores don’t have any kind of customer relationship management software to support their catering sales and delivery efforts,” says Weinstein.
Notte adds, “There’s no clear three-­way communication path for customers, store employees, and our headquarters.” When a customer calls, a store employee writes the catering order on a piece of paper and later types it into the store’s point-­of-­sale (POS) terminal. The store employee must print and fax the order and invoice to Jamba Juice headquarters. “It’s not always clear where things stand with a catering order, its invoicing, and so on, which equates to a lot of phoning and faxing between headquarters and our stores,” says Notte.
Lack of workflow processes also resulted in confusion when stores needed specialized maintenance, such as plumbing and electrical work. Headquarters and the stores used paper mail for invoicing, and it was always unclear who should issue the invoice to the vendor. That uncertainty led to a lot of time required for clarification, invoice approvals, and so on. “Our lack of set processes and consistency when it came to vendor compensation presented a huge opportunity to improve efficiency,” says Notte.
More generally speaking, field employees sometimes struggled due to a lack of visibility among the many different corporate departments at Jamba Juice. Problems arise when these different departments all want to promote their individual priorities, delivering their own important information and making their own demands of the company’s field employees. “A store manager’s primary responsibilities are to take care of customers and team members and to build the store’s business,” says Weinstein. “When multiple corporate departments ask them to take on new products, procedures, and campaigns, the managers become overloaded.”
For example, Jamba Juice recently introduced oatmeal as a new product in its stores. That addition required store managers to change their store setups, train team members, and lead the initial efforts to promote the oatmeal and deliver it satisfactorily. In the same week, Jamba Juice human resources department might have required store managers to change the way that they administered employee benefits, and managers also might have been asked to change the way they submitted a facilities work order to fix a maintenance issue. One corporate department had no way of knowing its requests were coinciding with simultaneous requests from other departments. “We needed a way to meter what we—as a whole—delivered to the “Giving Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities to our field store employees will help them and their … managers … learn from each other and address potential issues more proactively.”
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information Technology, Jamba Juice
field and what we asked of them,” says Weinstein.
Overall, Jamba Juice wanted to minimize the amount of time that store managers spent dealing with non-­customer-­related activities so that they could focus on customers’ experiences. Solution
Jamba Juice determined that the time was ripe to invest in new technologies and update its IT capabilities. Jamba Juice believed that, like taking the time to properly repair and equip a boat when the weather’s bad for fishing, it made sense to put systems and processes in place that would help the company be successful once the economic outlook became brighter. “When the fish begin to bite again, not only is that fisherman ready, but with the improvements to his boat and equipment, he’ll catch more fish than ever before,” says Notte. “We believe that putting the right technology in place does the same thing for us in terms of future profitability and employee productivity.”
Jamba Juice evaluated its technology options and decided to embrace an integrated environment based on Microsoft® products. “We used Microsoft tools before the economy went downhill, and we knew that we wanted to take advantage of the broader range of Microsoft product offerings,” says Notte. “The recession timing was a great opportunity for us to address our manual processes, lack of workflow, and business intelligence issues and support new functionality with Microsoft products.” The company started the process when it signed a Microsoft Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL) Suite agreement in December 2008 because of the wealth of products that were included in the agreement. “The ECAL’s continuous upgradability played a big role in our signing it,” recalls Notte. “It was less expensive for us to go with the agreement than to buy a whole bunch of licenses and find ourselves in the same situation again in two to three years.” In addition, the company liked the idea of spreading out predictable payments over three years instead of paying all at once for licenses up front. Internal Portal Deployment
With the licensing agreement in place, Jamba Juice began its software planning and deployment process. The company used Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as the basis for JambaNet, an internal portal that it launched in December 2008. The initial phase of the portal includes functionality such as weather forecasting to help individual store managers see a local five-­day forecast and adjust their staff and inventory accordingly. (The nicer the weather, the more employees and product ingredients are required to keep up with demand.)
The portal also encompasses mechanisms for all communications between stores and corporate headquarters, a company directory, and centralized access to other sites and applications frequently needed by employees, such as a link to the Web pages for office supply ordering, expense reimbursement, and the results from Mystery Shopper, which is a third-­party service that shops Jamba Juice stores and measures them on the customer service criteria that the company has identified as most important to its success. “The Microsoft solutions that we’re deploying will increase employee understanding and get more people moving in the same direction, which will help us increase the speed and quality of our business.”
Jamba Juice is using the portal to reinforce key companywide announcements. It also can be used to launch new products and marketing campaigns;; recognize individual, store, and district achievements;; and share customer feedback and store best practices. In addition, the portal contains reports for store, district, regional, and corporate manager use, including profit-­and-­loss reports, labor reports, and others. “Managers now have vital data pertaining to their stores, and a snapshot view of their stores’ sales information, cost of goods, and performance on payrolls and labor,” says Weinstein.
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information Messaging System Upgrade
Because it now has a licensing agreement in place, Jamba Juice is working to upgrade several parts of its existing infrastructure to take advantage of new functionality and IT management efficiencies. The company has launched a pilot project involving Microsoft products and some new hardware at a handful of stores. If all goes as anticipated, Jamba Juice plans to start the companywide rollout in May 2009 and upgrade all its company-­owned stores by the end of October 2009. “Once we prove the business benefits of upgrading, we’ll encourage our franchisees to upgrade, too.”
As of April 2009, Jamba Juice is midway through its upgrade to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The company has set up one server computer for its corporate environment and another to serve its company-­owned stores. There are approximately 200 corporate and field management accounts and more than 1,000 store accounts, since each company-­
owned store has two mailboxes. “We’ve purchased the hardware and are building the new Exchange Server 2007 environment,” says Notte. “Once testing is complete, we’ll migrate all our company-­
owned stores, probably by the end of June 2009. Future Functionality
Jamba Juice is conducting a pilot test of Microsoft Forefront™ Client Security and plans to implement it in all its company stores. “Forefront Client Security gives us a smaller antivirus footprint compared with McAfee and other competitors,” says Notte.
The company also has extensive plans to streamline operations using workflow processes supported by Office SharePoint Server 2007. Jamba Juice will, for example, establish a catering workflow process and one for handling employee paid time off, and it also intends to integrate invoicing processes into the Microsoft Dynamics® GP business software system. Says Weinstein, “One of our priorities for the next few months is to enable employees to use the Office SharePoint Server 2007 system to make it easier for them to manage customer relationships and grow their catering business.”
Jamba Juice also plans to set up central calendar management so that all store and field activities are centralized and tied into workflow processes. “We want to link all communications that are sent from our corporate office to our stores through one central calendar so that everyone has visibility into the full picture of what’s going on. In that way, we can work together to support, rather than overwhelm, those in “What used to take a store manager 15 minutes to locate can now be found in seconds—with no more uncertainty about it being the right version.”
Jeff Weinstein, Director of Operations Development, Jamba Juice
the field with our information and requests,” says Weinstein.
Another of the company’s goals is to promote greater information sharing by moving its paper-­based log of store activities to the Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal. Before leaving, an employee will record relevant information as to what happened on his or her shift so that the incoming shift employees will have key details—perhaps related to the equipment, the product ingredients, or a customer—at their fingertips. “Giving Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities to our field store employees will help them and their district and regional managers heighten their awareness of what’s happening in the stores, learn from each other, and address potential issues more proactively,” says Notte.
Business intelligence is another area that Jamba Juice aims to enhance, supported by Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Dashboard and alerting functionalities will provide workers with a clear, easy-­to-­interpret representation of their store’s performance compared with other stores, regions, previous months or years, and so on. For managers and employees who need it, the business intelligence features will contain in-­depth analysis capabilities as well.
The company identified training as yet another area for improvement now that Jamba Juice has implemented its business productivity solutions. For example, all company employees are required by law to participate in workplace harassment training. Jamba Juice has to pay for employees to go to the nearest office service store, public library, or home because employees currently cannot access the training video from the stores’ backrooms. “There’s all sorts of training we’d like employees to be able to access through a Web browser right in the stores,” says Notte. “In addition to legally required training sessions, we’ll be able to post training videos that show employees how to use a new software application or clean new equipment.” The company plans to use Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and its Office Live Meeting functionality to hold and record training sessions and make them available later through Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Benefits
Jamba Juice is indeed making great strides toward efficiency that it hopes will pay big dividends as the economy turns around. The company continues to put in place measures that will reduce operational costs, streamline processes, improve business intelligence, and help boost sales capabilities. “We’re getting the tools that we need to plan and execute more effectively,” says Notte. “The Microsoft solutions that we’re deploying will increase employee understanding and get more people moving in the same direction, which will help us increase the speed and quality of our business.”
Greater Employee Productivity
Jamba Juice employees are already finding that they need to spend less time in the back of the store, away from customers. For instance, they now can locate the documents that they need because the “originals” folder no longer exists. Instead, store managers use the Enterprise Search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007. “We were able to review all the documentation and reduce it by half, mostly by removing outdated versions,” says Weinstein. “Then we put the remaining accurate information on JambaNet so that employees can quickly and easily search for exactly what they need. What used to take a store manager 15 minutes to locate can now be found in seconds—with no more uncertainty about it being the right version.”
Employees also will be spending significantly less time on manual processes. “Previously, store managers spent approximately 15 hours per week on administrative tasks. We intend to make the most of our Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities and ultimately reduce that number by half,” says Weinstein. “We’ll be saving time that didn’t used to add value. Instead, employees will be empowered to invest that time in people by training team members and in building the business. When you multiply 5 to 10 hours of more intelligently invested time per week by 500 store managers and 52 weeks, that’s a very significant gain.”
Improved Business Intelligence
Jamba Juice is about to introduce a dashboard on JambaNet that shows store managers their status with regard to key performance indicators (KPIs). “Each homepage will show a snapshot of the metrics that are most important to Jamba Juice and that we use to evaluate a manager’s performance,” explains Weinstein. “At any given time, store managers can view the health of their stores. They’ll also know that their district and regional managers, along with company executives, all are looking at the same information, which makes it much easier for a district manager to have a productive conversation with a store manager about targeting the right goals.”
Now that the company has greater access to its business analytics, it can make smarter decisions on everything from managing shifts to handling promotions. “Compiling and distributing accurate, up-­to-­
date information through our integrated Microsoft environment gives everyone, including individual store managers, useful, trustworthy status information that will help district managers hold store managers accountable and will help Jamba Juice take steps that ensure greater overall profitability,” says Notte. Reduced Costs and Increased Sales
Jamba Juice believes that its investment in Microsoft products is helping it reduce its operational costs. “I expect that we’ll save 50 percent in software costs over six years by signing the ECAL agreement,” says Notte. But the savings don’t end there. “Even the little things add up. For instance, we’re using less paper and incurring fewer shipping costs, and we’re finding ways for employees to get more done while they’re at work so that we don’t have to pay for them to spend extra time on things like training.”
The company also is putting in place the tools that employees need to increase their stores’ selling potential. “Just simplifying the catering workflow for employees—
making things more consistent, less manual, and more streamlined—will motivate stores to seek more outside catering sales because they’re less onerous and frustrating to deal with,” says Notte. “And having drill-­down analysis capabilities will lead to improved sales because each store will be able to identify its slowest and busiest times and adjust For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-­
9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-­
2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-­
of-­hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-­5234 in the United States or (905) 568-­9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com staffing and purchasing accordingly. Having that kind of visibility also enables managers to identify and act on opportunities for greater profitability.”
For more information about Jamba Juice products and services, call (510) 596-­
0100, or visit the Web site at: www.jambajuice.com
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007
Document published April 2009
With infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-­managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.
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Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Forefront
Microsoft Forefront Client Security
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics GP