Tasos Christidis

Through this channel I have been talking about the advantages of cloud and SaaS products for a long time. In this post I’d like to focus on a more specific area. An area that contains a large pool of potential customers, who at the same time are still facing basic problems in their journey towards a “computerized enterprise”. That of small business ERP and especially the Financial ERP . By the term “Financial ERP” we define the software that performs the basic functions of book-keeping, sales and purchases, stock keeping customer/vendor order management and perhaps some more like basic workflows and some kind of business intelligence. These are requirements that small and medium-sized businesses are seeking to approach first, or they have already done so with not much success. Also, they are the kind of requirement that start-ups are trying to cover, since they touch the back-bone of the business function.

In an older post, I explored the impact of SaaS in the Outsourcing business (see here:   SaaS and the outsourcing function ) and the benefits that any outsourcing company and its customers would   enjoy from the adoption of SaaS. In this post I shall explore the benefits that the Cloud computing/SaaS can have in another area: that of the Franchise business. In a Franchising model there is the part of the Franchisor (the company that offers the franchise product) and the franchisee (the companies that reside “below the umbrella” of the franchisor and reach out to the final customer). In any franchise “package” a number of products and services is offered to the franchisee in order to start and maintain a viable business; typically, this includes stock replenishment for the franchisor’s products, training, sales support etc. In some cases, the franchisor also offers the necessary software to run the franchisee business. And this is the issue that we are interested in, tod...