Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2015 | Page 26

TITA N S O F TE C H N O L O GY
the company’s approximately 300 stores
when it rolled out. As the company grows,
new features are added—as long as they
solve a problem and are economically
justified. Scherer has a “wish list” of requested improvements from across the
company, but anyone who makes a request
must prove its ROI, or it comes off the
list. “They’re not the ones who pay for
it—the franchisees do,” he says.
Scherer and his 15-person IT team
work most directly with Hope and the
marketing department, and the two meet
almost daily. He also works closely with
the executive team, including the senior
vice president of strategic initiatives.
Over the years, when looking to add
new features for marketing and to better
serve customers, Hope would ask Scherer,
“Can we add this? Can it come out of
your budget?” Says Hope, “That was the
impetus to get us to work together—we

Rich Hope
both had limited budgets and needed to
compete with other brands.” Because of
that, he says, “We’re very open with every project. We have a tight-knit executive team here who enjoy working with
each other.”
Budgeting for IT projects is generally
allocated into two areas: 1) customer-facing
technology, with two people working in
Hope’s marketing department (supervised
by Scherer) who focus on the brand’s website, text messaging, etc.; and 2) franchisee-facing technology (e.g., POS system,
food and labor, and reporting systems for
sales), paid for by monthly technology
fees from the franchisees.
“We have employees now who overlap—regardless of whether they’re on
the IT, technology, or marketing budget,” says Hope. “My people couldn’t
live without the database people on the

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CIO ADVICE
• Make sure you include all of the
stakeholders: marketing, operations,
purchasing, marketing, executives and,
of course, the franchisees.
• It’s good to have an IT roadmap,
as well as a wish list, but make sure that
whatever you do has a clear ROI.
tech side, drawing from all the massive
databases we have. It’s a CMO’s dream
to have real-time data on sales and tie all
our data together. It really allows us to
better serve customers because we have
all this data about them.”

SHORE POINTS
REWARD PROGRAM
In spring 2012, Jersey Mike’s replaced its
punch-card loyalty program with Shore
Points Rewards, a mobile-based app that
lets customers use their smartphones to
order and pay online, manage rewards,
post to social feeds, and find the nearest
Jersey Mike’s. At the time, the company
said this was one of the first apps to roll
digital ordering and loyalty rewards program management into one, providing
customers with a seamless experience.
Adoption was swift: 650,000 members
in the first 6 months, 1.4 million after
13 months, and membership is pushing
3 million today.
“This was our biggest collaborative
operation,” says Scherer. “It had to be
something the customers used and liked,
had to provide data for marketing and
operations, and had to be easy to use at
the store.” It also resulted in the brand’s
first Breakthrough Award from Hospitality
Technology in the Enterprise Innovator
category. “Technology is changing at an
extraordinary rate,” said Scherer at the
time. “We built our own customer terminals so we can accommodate existing
and upcoming innovations.”
Talk about 20/20 foresight. The October 1st deadline for EMV-capable card
readers is rapidly approaching. Adapting
to EMV requirements is not a change
directly justified by ROI, but it does
allow the company to avoid liability in
the case of credit card fraud or a data
breach. “There are some things you’re
forced to do,” says Scherer. “It’s a cost
of doing business.”

In-house or outsource?
Both Scherer and Hope were outside
vendors when they began working with
Jersey Mike’s. Now inside, they continue
to employ third-party vendors—as long
as those vendors are willing to work with
their API. “We now require our vendors
to code to our standards,” says Scherer.
Scherer uses third-party tech vendors
for two purposes: when the company needs
something rolled out quickly, and for functions outside his team’s core competencies.
Currently that includes online ordering,
network security, and video analytics for
the restaurants. He had used an outside
vendor for the Monday morning reports
for about a year, but has since brought that
inside; and, after 18 months of using a third
party for text messaging, the company is
about to bring that in-house as well.
To manage food and labor at the restaurants, the company uses software from
CrunchTime. “We’ll never bring that inhouse,” says Scherer. “It not only increases
top-line sales and reduces costs, but also
helps us with quality control and keeps
labor costs as low as possible without sacrificing service.” In 2014, the brand was
recognized with a Breakthrough Award
from Hospitality Technology in the Enterprise Innovator category for integrating
CrunchTime into its POS system.
In its ongoing effort to better use the
data collected through the POS system,
Jersey Mike’s continues to seek out tech
vendors who can integrate that data for
them. “Almost everything we do has some
kind of technology application,” says Hope.
And while the POS remains the X