Quickbase keeps Henley-Valvoline a well-oiled machine

One tool, one person, multiple solutions

Henley Enterprises, Inc. is the largest national franchisee of Valvoline Instant Oil Change. The company operates in over 240 locations across the country and employs more than 3,000 people. While the company’s size is already impressive, Henley’s decision-makers are always looking for new opportunities to expand.

One of the key leaders of this expansion initiative is Kelly-Ann Taintor, Associate Director of Corporate Development. She’s been with Henley for 25 years and has moved her way up the company — starting as an administrative assistant and now overseeing corporate development — using her knack for getting things done and delivering impactful results.

“I oversee our corporate development process. This includes the workflow starting at initial analysis of a site, and continues through the legal process, permitting, construction or acquisition to the end which is opening day for a store,” said Kelly-Ann.

So, just how fast is Henley increasing their footprint?

Before Quickbase, silos and no single source of truth led to costly delays

With such an ambitious expansion strategy, Kelly-Ann and her team faced some eye-opening growing pains when they initially attempted to juggle numerous new locations openings on the same timeline. Looking back, Kelly can now recognize some clear issues:

• A lack of a central source-of-truth for their many different projects
• An inability to alert stakeholders when the status of a project had changed
• No standardized procedures for following an established new store checklist
• Costly delays for store openings 

Just as Henley leadership was at a loss for how to reconcile workflow shortcomings and lack of visibility into project statuses, Quickbase was brought up as a potential solution for their project management needs.

“After we grew so quickly, it became apparent that our process was disorganized and stressful with everyone scrambling to get things done. It was overwhelming and clear we needed to find a solution that could solve a lot of our problems,” reflected Kelly-Ann.

Improving workflows, unlocking deeper insights, and centralizing crucial data

With so many different projects in-flight — each with their own unique processes and deadlines — it’s critical that Kelly-Ann can monitor all of the moving pieces in her orbit all at the same times. Whether it is ensuring site negotiations are moving along, renovations are optimized to fit necessary equipment, making sure the right permitting is place for opening day, or tracking the overall project expenses store-by-store, Kelly-Ann and her team cannot afford any avoidable missteps.

Enter Quickbase.

Henley initially launched Quickbase within their construction department to help manage the workflows for the teams actually building their sites. However, Kelly-Ann and her team quickly realized how much of a difference Quickbase could make within the company beyond their initial scope

With their site development application in Quickbase, Henley was able to create a single source-of-truth for each of their stores. By centralizing all their data, they could make more informed decisions about next steps or whether renovations were necessary.  

Quickbase ensures all stakeholders are aware of the current status of any project and that workflows continue as intended. “Order of operations is very important,” explained Kelly-Ann. “It’s crucial to give different departments notice to kick off their role in the process and give everyone enough lead time so everything is ready when a store opens.”

The process for opening a store has now greatly improved and Henley has seen positive results. “We are able to open stores quicker, which saves us money during the development phase and also starts driving revenue faster,” she continued.

Thanks to the initial success Henley saw with their real estate development application, Kelly-Ann has since built four separate processes into Quickbase. These processes help Henley track construction progress, site selection and development details, corporate governance of their multiple entities, and their overall property portfolio.

According to Kelly-Ann, the benefits of using Quickbase include:

• Ease-of-use and ability to update processes and workflows on the fly
• The ability to create in-depth reports
• Automatic notifications
• Acting as a central source-of-truth for documentation
• Integrating with multiple platforms

Kelly-Ann is now the owner and main developer of Quickbase at Henley. She sees huge potential in the solution and has plans to further the company’s use of the platform in the future.

She wants to build multiple applications for each of her processes so there’s more oversight and control of each area. Additionally, as the company continues to expand and purchase more property, they need a solution to track the properties with third-party operators included in their real estate portfolio. 

An innate ability — and desire — to tackle any challenges that come her way makes Kelly-Ann the ideal Quickbase user. She can easily create applications to solve multi-faceted problems and readily adapt to an ever-changing landscape.