It was a cold rainy day when I went to my favorite cigar shop (my occasional vice) and got to chatting with another patron enjoying a rainy day cigar. Just so happens this fellow owned a few Domino’s pizza franchises.  We got to talking about business and technology.  He was quite enthused with a technology that allowed him to take time to relax outside of his demanding business.

I never really thought about the issues “the pizza man” faced in order to make sure his locations run a peak performance.  Things like on time deliveries to clients, employees giving away too many freebies also known as theft, pizza waiting for delivery and so much more.

While we sat talking he received a few text messages that he explained we automated alerts.  For example, if there was a pattern of pizza’s waiting too long for delivery (thus a hungry and annoyed customer) he receive a text that included pertinent information like the manager on duty and average time pizza waiting to get to a driver.  Turns out that this technology is monitoring conditions in their franchise software. Any condition that exceeds store standards causes an alert in the form of a text.  As a owner of mulitple stores and managing many people, “the pizza man” was able to monitor mutiple locations all while not being onsite. The result, proactive management. Better customer service. Theft reduction. And more.

Although my clients are not retail shops typically, we have found that this type of Virtual Business Managemet to be just as important.  Take a Vice Presidnet of Sales for example and her need for alerts.  What conditions cause poor sales perfomance? Lack of lead follow up? Large deals with lack of activity?   Why wait till you receive historical reports (e.g. Proft & Loss, Sales reports, Win/Loss reports, etc). Why not monitor these conditions and receive your own alert proactively so you can re-write history.

Solutions like Vineyard Software’s KnowledgeSync provide the ability to monitor cross platform databases.  As an example KnowledgeSync can monitor your CRM database and your ERP data for conditions and send appropriate texts, emails and reports automatically.  For small and mid sized business who work hard to keep costs down yet need very proactive management for peak performance Virtual Business Management is a must have.   We’ve developed a number of Business Alerts for Virtual Business Management.  Many are free.  So, if the “pizza man can, so can you!”