Suncor Energy is one of Canada's leading integrated energy company and gasoline retailer. eDynamic's Franchise Application Management System was tailored to manage Suncor's Gasoline Retail opportunities across North America.

Suncor Energy was going through a rapid expansion phase in Canada as well as the US and wanted to increase their franchise network rapidly while ensuring that the selected franchises were the most suitable candidates allowing Suncor to pick the crème of the crop.

The company had been receiving an average of 40 applications from potential franchisees per day! The screening process of applications was becoming extremely cumbersome and unmanageable. Their goal was to devise a franchise application management system for them that would allow the following:

• Offer integrated functionality to enable and manage all aspects of the franchisee selection process from Pipeline and Workflow Management to Sales Support
• Enhance efficiency by reducing the unproductive ‘paper processing’ time, thus allowing existing employees to handle more applications
• Incorporate the pre-defined selection criteria used by Suncor
• Ensure automated communication with the applicant and potential franchisee.

Solution
eDynamic customized it’s franchise application management system, FAMS™, to set up a comprehensive “Retail Opportunity Application Management System” for Suncor Energy.

Using this system, the applicants could access and submit an online application form for the retail opportunity, track the status of their application, be updated on following steps, send messages to the application manager and edit their application real time at any time. Additionally, the new system enabled Suncor Energy to manage the application lifecycle through various stages and extract comprehensive reports from the system and use them for critical and insightful data analysis.

Results
The new application management system has helped Suncor Energy to manage their franchise system much better in the following ways:

• Provided them with the flexibility and choice of being able to process as applications of their choice and at their time and convenience
• Widened their network of people that apply for Suncor’s franchise opportunity by providing a simple to use, straight forward and self explanatory system
• Offered transparency into the recruitment process
• Eliminated visibility concerns as applicants easily locate the opportunity on the corporate website
• Increased the success rate of the prospective franchisees by providing them all the relevant information of a candidate before they start operations allowing them to create focused training programs
• Reduced Suncor’s recruitment team from 4 members to 1 by automating the application submission, evaluation and communication process
• Allows for greater flexibility and choice to the managers and other corporate employees, to view the status of various applications in the system using a state of the art filtering and prioritizing capabilities
  Moreover, the “relocation report” provided by the system has helped Suncor in managing regions with fewer applications more efficiently. This report provides information on other prospects who have opted for more remote locations.
• eDynamic has enhanced Suncor’s process and ensured a high return on investment within a 6 month period.