Franchise Brands plc Annual Report and Accounts 2018 14 FOCUSED ON OUR INVESTMENT IN TECHNOLOGY Enhancing efficiency and customer experience We are digitally-enabling our business to enhance our customer experience and help us and our franchisees become more efficient. As customers digitise their end-to-end business processes, it is vital that we develop systems that can efficiently and accurately integrate with theirs. As a key strategic enabler, technology will reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and free up our people to focus on activities where they can add real value. Investment in Metro Rod systems At Metro Rod, our starting point in late 2017 was to migrate our systems onto a cloud-based platform which has significantly improved reliability and performance. In 2018 we rolled out several technology developments that generated efficiencies by automating repetitive, manual tasks. For example, we are using robotics to log jobs onto our system from emails. Approximately 40% of jobs are now logged automatically, resulting in jobs being logged more quickly and accurately. Engineers, as well as the right equipment, can be deployed more rapidly, enhancing our ability to meet customer Service Level Agreements (“SLAs”) . We are also using robotics to monitor and update the status of jobs in real time, which, again, is helping us improve performance on customer SLAs and customer reporting. We are currently monitoring our largest ten customer portals in this way. Robots also assist our franchisees as they are notified automatically via SMS if an engineer fails to log onto a customer portal when on site. 95% of jobs that are logged via a portal are now monitored and tracked using robotics. STRATEGY IN ACTION The dashboard allows franchisees to drill down into particular metrics such as engineer productivity, SLAs, work completed and job mapping. MI and reporting A key system we have rolled out at Metro Rod is a digital MI and reporting tool for our franchisees and the Support Centre. This dashboard, accessible from any PC or mobile device, provides our franchisees with a suite of financial, operational and productivity metrics. These metrics can also be compared to other Metro Rod franchise businesses which helps with sharing best practice. The system incorporates Artificial Intelligence, meaning that in future we will be able to identify previously unseen patterns in the data. Total Group IT spend in 2018 £1.5m % of jobs logged automatically 40%