From the artisan breads on its shelves to the soups and sandwiches prepared behind the counter, Au Bon Pain has numerous operations and items to monitor at its 220 locations. The company measures success not just by SKU counts, but in food preparation and customer satisfaction. By putting
real-time information literally on the hips of district managers in the form of mobile devices, Au Bon Pain has seen instant improvements in operations.

The Boston-based chain relies on a team of area directors who visit cafes to ensure that sales are reaching goals and that inventory and service expectations are being met. Area directors assess a cafe’s performance through a variety of metrics that they then compare and measure against company standards.

One of the most important pieces of information for the area directors is the daily P&L statement. In the past, Au Bon Pain administrators would crunch the numbers overnight, and area directors would print the reports early the following morning before leaving their home offices.

Laptops took mobility a step further, but still required area directors to sit in one particular location while they accessed information. Often called upon to move about the cafe or make an unexpected visit to another location, area managers ultimately needed to have information and reports at their fingertips on a moment’s notice.

Each area director oversees anywhere from six to 10 stores and can be called upon to do anything from helping resolve a customer complaint to handling employee relations issues. When it comes to analyzing the performance of each store, access to data is critical: the harder they have to work to find it, the less time they have to devote to their primary roles.

“They’ve got so many things to deal with,” says Ed Mockler, senior vice president of IT for Au Bon Pain. “So many things can come up at any point in time in the cafe. The last thing they need to do is have to deal with administrative tasks” or be tied down to a laptop.

Laptops added mobility to PC capabilities, and devices like smartphones and BlackBerry devices can take it even further. With them, area directors can roam about the cafe, multi-task and still have access to critical information and P&L reports.

“By putting all the reports onto a mobile platform and onto a device that is on the hip, it gives them a lot of flexibility,” Mockler says.

To facilitate the use of mobile devices in the field, Au Bon Pain enlisted Enterprise Mobile, a Massachusetts-based company focused on driving faster, improved and more cost-effective implementation of Windows Mobile-based messaging and applications.

Au Bon Pain had “a good sense of the information that the field manager needed to know,” says Enterprise Mobile CEO Mort Rosenthal, “but the next step was to put that together, deploy it and manage it.”

Pilot program launch
Au Bon Pain assigned devices to 10 area directors and administrators in December 2007. The company used the P&L application for the pilot mobility program, Mockler says, because it was an important and daily function that would allow users to quickly learn through experience.

Half of the pilot participants received Palm Treos; the other half got Motorola Qs. Au Bon Pain instituted training classes for both the operation of the devices and running the programs required to generate reports.

“Some of them had just cell phones before, some had some smartphone experience and a couple of them had BlackBerry experience,” says Karen Falcone, director of service development for Enterprise Mobile. “We thought the key to making the pilot successful was to get them on an application that they had to use every day.”

While mobile applications are generally easy to conceive, it is important that users decide what information they truly require in the field, Rosenthal says. Because of the size of hand-held devices – particularly their displays — it isn’t always practical to view a full spreadsheet: therefore, a few important metrics often are singled out.

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