A&W Canada: Xchange, rebuilt around the franchisees and restaurant managers who run on it

Xchange is how A&W Food Services of Canada talks to its franchisees and restaurant managers. On a restaurant visit in August 2016, the manager told us he gets online mostly through his phone and opens Xchange two or three times a day to see if there are new bulletins. He reads what other operators report so he can check his own restaurant: if they are complaining about the onions, he pays special attention to the onions. Every Monday he prints the week’s forms, and when someone new starts he goes looking for the orientation package. The franchisee we met checks it about once a week to pay invoices, compare his benchmarks and make sure the marketing calendar and coupons are set up in his tills.

Between them they named the problems: searching Xchange was really hard and the results were not that useful, there was too much information to read on a phone, the marketing calendar was easier to print than to read on screen, and the self-assessments linked from Xchange were hard to log in to. They wanted everything behind a single sign-on. Xchange was an in-house application from 1998, good at collecting data but not at managing promotions, policies and training, and A&W’s own team named governance as its main concern.

Discovery with the people who publish and the people who read

In August 2016 we spent time at A&W’s head office in Vancouver: a workshop with the intranet team, 9 interviews with content authors across departments, and the restaurant visit with a franchisee and a restaurant manager. Authors told us which forms restaurants use most: food safety and the checklists they fill in all the time and must show an inspector.

A prototype tested with franchisees

We tested the prototype in six sessions with franchisees running one, four and six restaurants, an area manager and managers from Quebec. Two requests came from more than two of them, and both went into the plan for the first release: a section with everything needed to train a new hire, and a promotions calendar that shows last year’s promotions to help forecast sales.

The right content for each restaurant

We built the new Xchange on IBM WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager, with our Portal Blueprint component framework. Content is tagged and delivered by restaurant number and role, department sites from marketing and promotions to equipment and people practices moved into one structure in English and French, and a governance model tells each publisher what they own. Electronic forms replaced cumbersome data collection, and single sign-on connects A&W’s other applications.

Ready on day one

The new portal went live at the end of 2016, after a pilot with a group of restaurants, with a bilingual support desk ready for people who could not find what they were looking for and a five-minute scavenger hunt to help managers learn the new site.

Eight more years of improvements

From 2017 to 2024 we supported and extended Xchange: a food safety section (2018); search that needs every keyword to match and ranks titles higher (2019); and, in 2022, sign-in through Okta, with self-service password resets, planned in stages, a group of stores at a time. The single sign-on asked for on that 2016 restaurant visit was still guiding the work six years later.

Xchange went from a 1998 in-house application to a portal built around the people who use it: content tagged and delivered by restaurant and role, in English and French, single sign-on to the applications franchisees and managers use, and electronic forms in place of cumbersome data collection.

A&W kept us on after the build: we supported and extended the portal for eight years, from 2017 through 2024, and each improvement, from food safety to search to sign-in, answered something franchisees and managers had told us.