What's under the hood?

According to David Henry in the shared services division of Driven Brands, the company provides critical support to their franchisees to both help get their business off the ground and continue running smoothly and profitably. “We provide services like accounting, financial planning and analysis, HR and payroll, pooled funds for national advertising, and critical technology
that many would not have access to as a smaller local service provider.”

To make it all happen, Driven Brands relies on Sage Business Cloud and RKL eSolutions According to David, one of the best examples of how they leverage technology to streamline operations is related to Maaco. “We have national contracts with all the largest paint suppliers so we can buy in volume to take advantage of discounted pricing, and then resell the paint to our
franchisees. It’s a complex system of placing orders with vendors and processing orders from hundreds of Maaco locations that wouldn’t be possible in our Sage ERP system without the support and customization that RKL eSolutions provides.” He also
mentions that without the right technology in place, the franchisees would probably have to make purchase on their own and pay substantially more without the volume discounts.

Accounting management on cruise control

One major project that RKL eSolutions implemented was to help Driven Brands simplify the accounting management of multiple entities. “In the past, all of our various entities were setup as individual companies. We were constantly switching back and forth – maybe 4 dozen times per day - to enter transactions in different companies or to make one simple change that had to be replicated 50 different times,” says David. “But RKL eSolutions helped us set up just two companies– one for U.S. entities and one for Canadian entities– within Sage that is saving us tons of time and has significantly simplified management and accounting for all our different entities.”

Driven Brands has made several acquisitions over the last few years, each of which is accompanied by necessary updates to their software systems. “RKL eSolutions has been a tremendous resource in helping us make that process efficient and accurate. If we had to do all the work of manually creating new customers, vendors, and other setup that’s required – especially with larger acquisitions – it would easily take months to complete. But with RKL’s help, we get it done in just weeks.”

High performance service and support

With all of the growth, changes, and complexity of operations at Driven Brands, they tend to leverage their ERP system in ways that it wasn’t designed to function “out of the box.”

According to David, “We’ve been running our current Sage ERP system for a very long time now, largely because of the service and support we get from RKL eSolutions. In reality, we probably would have been forced to upgrade to much more expensive software years ago to keep pace with company growth.” He adds, “But with the expertise and creative solutions that RKL provides, we’re getting great mileage and performance out of our current technology and we’re grateful for the relationship.”