SaaS Featured Article

Papa Murphy’s, the fifth largest pizza place in the country, is using Salesforce to increase the success of its expanding franchise business. Salesforce.com is a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

 

Using the Force.com PaaS, Papa Murphy’s International developed and deployed a highly-customized solution that allows it to track and manage franchisor information from initial inquiries to contract signing, through site construction and an ongoing basis for store operations. Salesforce.com (News - Alert) partner CenterStance helped deploy the solution for Papa Murphy’s.

 

“We have a very mobile workforce, and we needed a way for them to capture, access, and use information to increase the success of both our company and our franchisees,” said Brian Fisher, director of business technology at Papa Murphy’s. “Salesforce gave us exactly what we needed, since we could leverage existing features and also tailor the solution for our particular business. Our staff especially enjoys the ability to access Salesforce from their Blackberries, which eliminates the need to start up their computers constantly while on the road.”

Papa Murphy’s is one of the 43,600 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the Salesforce.com customer base as of April 30. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.

Papa Murphy’s was able to customize and implement their Salesforce CRM applications very rapidly, including Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Marketing, Salesforce Customer Portal and Salesforce Mobile for its franchise sales staff. In addition, it’s using Force.com to customize Salesforce and tapped into the AppExchange to add additional functionality, including Salesforce for Google (News - Alert) Adwords. Finally, after a training session, the company found users were quite comfortable with Salesforce and eager to use it and adoption has already exceeded expectations.

 

With this proven success for its franchise sales team, the company next rolled out Salesforce to its construction group and operations team. It took less than three months to design, implement and train employees on the custom objects, forms, applications and processes that have streamlined their internal operations. Fisher estimates that with other technology options available to his team, this project would have taken at least a year to rollout. He was truly impressed with the time saved on development and staff training. Now Papa Murphy’s has a single, centralized location in which to manage all aspects of its franchise business.

 

Papa Murphy’s is also using Salesforce Customer Portal for its internal help desk needs. Emails sent to the help desk automatically create a case, and the IT team can use Salesforce to assign resources and track the issue to resolution.

“Salesforce is so easy to use, and requires so little IT support, that we’ve tapped it for all aspects of our business, both internally and externally,” Fisher said. “We’ve increased productivity and improved communications, and now have a highly-efficient way to manage the growth of our franchise business. Salesforce is proving to be instrumental to our ongoing success.”

 

Murphy’s, the pioneer of the Take ‘N’ Bake pizza concept, operates more than 1,000 locations in 30 states and Canada. The Vancouver, Wash.-based company offers custom-made pizzas featuring fresh toppings on pizza dough made fresh daily. In addition to handmade pizzas, the company offers a growing menu of Take N’ Bake items, including cheesy bread, lasagna, chocolate chip cookie dough and freshly-made salads. Papa Murphy’s has been voted “Best Pizza Chain in America” for five consecutive years by consumers nationwide in the Restaurants and Institutions “Consumers’ Choice in Chains” survey.

 

Force.com reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with platform-as-a-service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service.

 

The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers

installing thousands of applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.