Wingers Adopting a Fresh Approach to Policy and Procedures

Wingers – the Chicken Wing company – is a young, fresh, modern franchise. When the team set out to franchise the popular fried chicken brand developed during the pandemic, they wanted the most efficient, streamlined processes put in place from day one. This makes life easy for franchisees. It’s little wonder that they chose to adopt a secure online portal to bring everything into one place from the outset. It sits well alongside their adoption of tech in the restaurants that enhances their customer experience.

I’ve been working with Wingers to implement their bespoke online portal we call TOP (The Ops Portal) which acts a little like an internal website. It’s a knowledge hub, where every policy and procedure including training and operations manual is searchable at a micro level, making the right information easy to locate and update. 

When I was developing my own franchise years ago, I wish it had been available! It would have made updates easy, impressed my franchisees and importantly, kept the manual at the forefront of the business and compliant with the franchise agreement.

I work with a UK developer, Kris Allen, whose expertise lies in building highly tailored software systems that run on modern web technology to create this ‘go-to’ manual software for the franchise industry and multi-site businesses.

Information is presented in a way that is easy to navigate and digest.  It’s now exactly the same for Wingers’ online operations portal. If a franchisee wants to know the exact way to make a side of fries for example, instead of discovering and needing to download numerous shared PDF documents, it is easy to locate just the small section of information required. 

As a new franchisor, it is inevitable that standard operating procedures will need to be updated to ensure compliance with the franchise agreement. TOP is built around the need for this kind of flexibility. Therefore, from a franchisor’s perspective, the information and framework of the portal is quick and easy to update so documents are always current and live.

The portal is not just for the operations manual. It offers a central place to access everything a franchisee needs from training information to links to the sites to order uniforms or marketing material to accounting. The central knowledge hub includes a dashboard even linking in with each franchisee’s EPOS system and CRM software so sales and marketing can be analysed and managed centrally. The built-in audit trail identifies a franchisee’s engagement and gives the head office team notice of a franchisee’s failure to respond.

As Wingers grows in the future, the team can add KPIs and key metrics in addition to drawing data from other systems to benchmark franchisees’ performance across the network. It will be easy to compare cost of sales, staff ratios or other metrics or targets for example, so franchisees can see what’s working best and how to improve.

The portal acts as a framework for a knowledge sharing centre. On the one hand it’s franchisee led so they can access information as required and on the other hand it’s franchisor led. For example a news blog on the home page shows the latest updates about the company. It can be friendly, celebrating a franchisee’s birthday or include more strategic news content. It is designed to draw a franchisee in every day.  

Other staff, such as the team that work in the kitchens, can be provided with restricted access as required too, ensuring they have access to all the information needed to complete their daily work. There is the potential for Wingers to add QR codes in the future too, so an operator can scan for operating information on cleaning for example.

The online operations manual is now far more than a franchise manual for Wingers! The Operations Portal offers all systems and procedures in one place and offers Wingers many benefits including:

• It’s part of Wingers’ franchisee brand experience
• No printing!
• Audit trail
• Instantly and easily updatable
• Developer-led – bespoke development options
• Can form a platform for training & onboarding
• Instant ‘switch off’ in case of a franchisee or employee termination
• Branded for Wingers’ business – colours and house style
• Flexible content presentation
• Continuous update means no major revamp for the manual once in place – it changes with Wingers

The online hub now presents a central operating guide for Wingers; franchisees, staff, managers and team members.