Challenge: This bedding franchise retailer struggled with a slow, cumbersome approach to data collection. 

Solution: Thanks to Domo, Forty Winks now automatically collects data from a growing number of its stores and is able to share business insights via dashboards and reports. 

Impact: Forty Winks can now leverage data to benchmark stores and create business plans to facilitate growth in turnover, profit margin and productivity.

Forty Winks ‘wakes up’ to the possibilities of data with Domo.

As Australia’s leading bedding retailer, Forty Winks is Serious about Sleep. The company has a franchise network of more than 100 retail locations in every major city and regional center across the country, whose primary objective is to ‘improve our customers’ lives through a better night’s sleep. 

As the Head of Technology at Forty Winks, one of Chris Panagiotou’s most important jobs is to provide the franchisee network with the data and insights they need to optimize their sales and marketing strategies.

A night light for insight.

Before Domo, the national support centre team at Forty Winks struggled to collect data from its franchisee stores. Some stores used one of two point of sale systems, while others would send in performance data via Excel spreadsheets. Some of their stores are still on manual systems, which required them to fax in data. The eCommerce platform had no reporting capabilities, which meant someone would have to manually total the sales from the order screen. 

Every week, the operations team would have to collect sales data from 100+ stores and manually input it into a series of spreadsheets. While unwieldy, the byzantine system worked, however, Panagiotou was faced with a choice – keep struggling to do things the old way, or modernize the process.

“Instead of learning how all those spreadsheets were held together, we decided it was time to replace it with a data warehouse. We chose Domo,” Panagiotou said.  

Thanks to Domo, Forty Winks now automatically collects data from its stores and uses it to create benchmarking dashboards and reports. In addition to year over year product and overall sales data, franchisees will soon be able to see customer data captured from their Forty Winks’ bedMATCH diagnostic system, providing stores with a better understanding of customer needs. By providing stores with quicker access to this data, individual franchisees are able to make smarter decisions about their sales, labour and marketing strategies.

“We can now see what our stores sold yesterday by category, and at what margin,” Panagiotou said.

In addition to providing more insight in near-real time, Forty Winks significantly reduced the time it spends collecting and processing data. For example, the finance team used to struggle with a manual invoicing process to collect franchise fees. Now, invoices are automatically generated through the power of Domo.  

“This was a process that used to take our finance team about a day and a half to generate invoices and send out individual emails. Now the process is completed in about an hour,” Panagiotou said.

Resting easy.

By simplifying data collection and synthesis, Forty Winks has used Domo to enable benchmarking, allowing it to identify its top-performing stores, salespeople, and products. With this information, it can identify best practices to share with other stores, as well as areas for improvement. “This gives us the opportunity to use insights to develop bespoke business plans by store,” Panagiotou said.

“For example, we discovered that we had some high selling sales staff, whose results looked amazing on paper. However, we were able to establish that the sales growth was due to increased discounting, which adversely impacted profit margins,” Panagiotou said.  

Thanks to Domo, Forty Winks can ensure it incentivizes the right behavior, promotes more profitable products, and improves performance at both the franchisee level and overall as a company. State Managers are now able to work with franchisees to determine benchmarks so they can provide the stores under their care with the information they need to maximize productivity.  

In addition, Domo enables State Managers to stay better connected as they travel from store to store. “The fact that we went from having no data to having the ability to get a report on your phone through the DOMO app is best practice” Panagiotou said. “Managers can now walk into a store and review data on a tablet with franchisees.” 

According to Panagiotou, this access has helped change the culture at Forty Winks by enabling them to take data just as seriously as they take sleep.