Expesite CEO Jeff Sopp recalls a meeting that took place a few years ago at Home Depot’s Atlanta headquarters.

During a break, he ran into then-CEO Bob Nardelli, who inquired as to what it was, exactly, that Sopp’s company did for Home Depot. “What we do is we help you open your stores faster,” Sopp replied, and he has been using that phrase ever since.

“I’d like to tell you I spent $100,000 on marketing development for that elevator speech, but it just came out of my mouth,” he says.

More precisely, Columbus, Ohio-based Expesite provides end-to-end software and services for multi-unit construction and real estate development. The privately-held company serves restaurants, retail stores, commercial and residential real estate development and financial institutions. It keeps clients like Circuit City, Wendy’s, Whole Foods Market and Wachovia linked throughout the construction process with a secure, web-based communications platform.

A franchise owner in Miami, for instance, can watch his Fort Lauderdale store be built from the comfort of his office. But it’s not a convenience-only solution: All parties involved in the process can communicate with one another and look at charts, data, photos or other reports in real time.

Expesite is “an ongoing living archive,” Sopp says. “We keep all that data in our system.”

With Wendy’s, for instance, Expesite has all 7,000 restaurants operating or in development archived on its server. If a company executive wants to ensure that an Oklahoma City location built in 2001 has made the necessary updates, all he has to do is click a few links. “Not only do we have the construction documents, but we have the tile layouts, countertops, ADA surveys with all the photographs to see if, in fact, the franchisee did blacktop the driveway when corporate told him to blacktop the driveway,” Sopp says.

The result of linking all these moving parts is that most retailers open stores two to four weeks faster, restaurants and financial institutions four to six weeks quicker.

Wendy’s originally began using Expesite for document management about six years ago. Since then, the nation’s No. 3 hamburger chain has embraced it as an important project rollout and new-store development tool.

“We needed a tool that would allow us to roll out equipment to all of our restaurants,” says Dave Smith, manager of engineering development systems for Wendy’s. Expesite has allowed him to not only track the equipment, but track the installer, serial number and shipping information in one program.

Wendy’s developed a new module that allows operators to schedule the installation of equipment, showing the availability of the installer and equipment line. (Starting in the fall, Sopp says, users will be able to purchase directly from Expesite.)

Wendy’s has also used the technology to help roll out new product lines (including the popular Freschetta sandwiches) and is currently using it for several new breakfast items.

Expesite “gives our kitchen equipment suppliers, our marketing vendors — everybody — access to the schedule in real time,” Smith says. Before, he says, workers e-mailed Excel spreadsheets back and forth among themselves, but “once you send [the information] in the e-mail, it’s wrong.

“We tell our users, ‘If you’re not getting your schedule through Expesite … whatever you’re looking at may be a day old, maybe a week old.’”

High visibility
The system is especially valuable to franchisees, who have full access to the reports. This helps prevent miscommunication on such things as the status of new equipment. Wendy’s recently rolled out a menu board program, and accessing the report on Expesite “actually shows [franchisees] their installation schedule,” Smith says. “It makes it real simple, real easy for them to use.”

While improving franchisee relations is nice, the real payoff for Wendy’s is the increased efficiency. Installation time is cut by a week to 10 days which, in the quick-serve world, can represent thousands of dollars in sales.

All of Expesite’s clients’ information is backed up on highly secured servers. There were no unscheduled downtimes in 2006 or 2007, Sopp says, and “we have the highest degree of redundancy data security. … We do immediate replication of data just in case of disaster recovery.”

In the past three years, Wendy’s Expesite system has experienced unscheduled downtime just once — for about six minutes, and “the scheduled downtimes have set windows and they send out e-mail notifications,” Smith says.

Vendors have access to the store base via Expesite, meaning they can see all the Wendy’s stores in one place. Less coordination is required, because everybody — from corporate to franchisees to suppliers — is looking at the same data in real time.