How Franchise model companies can benefit by moving to Google Workspace

Franchise model companies are always spread across multiple locations and have their own unique challenges with collaboration and communication and productivity. They have a peculiar operational style and a strong collaboration system is needed. With the efficient use of a collaboration suite like Google Workspace, those challenges can be mitigated. Google Workspace offers a wide range of cloud based services that help to streamline business operations, enhance productivity and improve collaboration. 

Let’s explore the benefits of Google Workspace for franchise model companies and how Google Workspace can help achieve business objectives.

Benefits of Google Workspace for franchise model companies

Establishing effective communication and collaboration between the franchise and franchisor is essential for the success of a franchise oriented business. Google Workspace offers a number of tools to help streamline communication and enhance collaboration. Some of them are:

  1. Google Meet for Video conferencing: Google Meet offers a great platform to connect with team members and collaborate in real time for businesses based in multiple locations, even across the world. 
  2. Google Chat for Instant Messaging: Google chat allows effective and instant messaging communication via chat messaging reducing the need for email and improving closer collaboration and productivity. 
  3. Single interface for Gmail, Tasks, Chat, Calendar: With a single interface to access all key services needed for collaboration and communication, Google Workspace users can access email, contacts, calendar, tasks and chat. 

Centralized Information Management

Having a centralized information management system immensely simplifies functioning of franchise model businesses. franchises can manage information efficiently by using:

  1. Google Drive: Google Drive offers a cloud based file storage and sharing service that helps team members store information and collaborate with each other. 
  2. Google Forms: If teams need data collection, Google Forms acts as a nice tool to be used for surveys and data collection. franchises always need to gather information about their employees, vendors and customers and Google Forms would be a great tool in their kitty. 
  3. Google Sites: If franchises need to build standard operating procedures, intranet portals and websites for sharing information within the organization and outside, Google sites helps immensely. 

Boost Productivity:

Google Workspace is well known for its services to provide a boost to productivity. Franchise businesses require huge productivity to succeed and Google Workspace offers the necessary tools like:

  1. Google Docs: Easy real time collaboration in documents reducing the need for email attachments and issues with version control is what Google Docs provides.
  2. Google Sheets: If you know the power of Microsoft Excel, you can imagine the power of a Google Sheet. It’s a cloud based tool offering the same functionality as Excel and much more with its collaboration features. franchises can use it to track KPIs and make data driven decisions making it a very useful tool. 
  3. Google Slides: Creating presentations is a dire need for franchises and they can communicate effectively using Google slide presentations to their teams, customers and vendors. 

Enhanced Security and Compliance: 

Franchises deal with sensitive information. Thus, data protection, security as well as compliance is a critical need. Some security and compliance tool for franchises are below:

  1. Security features like 2 step verification, data encryption and document access control make sure that the data is protected for franchises. 
  2. Compliance certifications like HIPAA and GDPR are supported by Google Workspace making it suitable for businesses that require regulatory compliance. 

Single Tenant Vs Multiple tenant for franchise using Google Workspace

One daunting question that might arise when moving to a cloud based collaboration and communication system like Google Workspace is to take a decision about single tenant existence vs multiple tenant. Using a single tenant, all the franchises can be under a single Google workspace management console and using multiple tenant approach, the franchises can operate separately without co-existing. 

There are certain pros and cons of each of the approaches but using single tenant for all franchises definitely adds a lot of benefits from a technical and collaborative perspective. Below are some considerations to keep in mind:

  1. Cost savings and operational overhead: Using a single tenant is more cost effective and simpler to manage than using separate tenants. A lot of operational overhead is added with the use of multiple tenants. 
  2. Easier collaboration: A single tenant definitely makes it easier to manage and collaborate with each other where employees across the organization can share documents, chat and meet using Google meet and Google calendar inside a single unified platform. Finding addresses using auto-complete and having a coherent email branding becomes much easier as well. 
  3. Centralized management: When joining a franchisor, the franchise expects to take less operational workload and ensure a seamless experience. So, it is important for the franchisor to have everything in control and offer them a great experience. That is only possible with centralized management of all franchise accounts, access levels and permissions. It ensures effective security policy enforcement as well as license compliance. 

Though different businesses might have different perspectives, it ultimately depends on a number of factors like number of existing franchises, level of collaboration required, security and branding needs to make a good decision. If the franchisor wants the franchise to have a lot of autonomy and maintain separate branding needs and offer flexibility for customization, separate tenants would make sense. 

Cloudasta has been helping franchisors and franchises take decisions about these important aspects right from the start. We have been a trusted Google partner and are providing managed migration services to Google Workspace for a long time. We have helped franchisors make these important decisions and take the plunge to move to Google Workspace effectively. Even if you are using a different collaboration and communication platform, we will help you migrate all your data securely without having any hassle. 

If you are a franchise looking to adopt the use of Google Workspace, please feel free to get in touch with our experts. We will be glad to help you with any questions that you may have. Having these questions clarified and ensuring that your business needs are fulfilled is extremely important and we will help you achieve that.