College Pro Painters

College Pro CPOWER Knowledge Management Solution

"I Envision... having an all-encompassing web site that gives our franchisees everything they need to manage their business while providing exceptional reporting and control capabilities for us.” April Broome, National Controller

The Client

College Pro Painters was founded by a college student in Thunder Bay, Ontario in 1971. It is North America’s original and most successful student-run painting and window-cleaning company. Nearly 25,000 homes in communities across North America are treated annually with their interior and exterior house painting and window-cleaning services. All managers – who are franchisees – are full time college students.

Today College Pro Painters is the largest residential painting company in North America. College Pro is a highly focused, tightly measured franchise program that uses over 80 full-time staff to recruit, train and operate hundreds of student run franchises annually. They operate in 28 U.S. states and in 7 Canadian provinces, and every year they recruit, select, and extensively train hundreds of franchise managers to deliver quality house-painting and window-cleaning services, run their own businesses, and uphold the promise of the College Pro Painters brand.

The Envision IT Solution

Envision IT developed an internet-based enterprise system that has revolutionized communication within the organization. It provides:

Instant entry of sales leads and customer service issues into a shared database by both call centres and line staff
Access over the internet for 800 franchisees to their individual sales leads for follow up and to record customer project details and revenue
Full reporting for all levels of the organization
Corporate-wide user database for reporting structure, security and HR
Integration with back-end accounting and payroll system
On-line budget, goal setting, weekly input and end of season close-down workflows
On-line interactive training and testing for franchises and painters

CPOWER provides a host of information for users at all levels

Secure Login for Extranet Users

The Results – Communication is the key!

Easy access to up-to-the-minute information for everyone in the organization
Significant labour savings in the collection of information
Updated, leading edge image with potential franchises
Consistent business processes across the organization

Award-Winning Solution

Envision IT was awarded the 2002 Microsoft e-Business Solution Award for work on this project.