Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
Customer Solution Case Study
Specialty Retailer Smoothes Operations for
Improved Productivity and Future Profits
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Retail—Specialty retail
Customer Profile
Emeryville, California–based Jamba Juice
provides real-fruit smoothies, meals, and
snacks. Jamba Juice has more than 700
stores, more than 500 of which are
company-owned and operated.
Business Situation
Jamba Juice needed to streamline its
processes and provide enhanced
communication capabilities to help store
and regional managers be more efficient,
thus boosting profitability.
Solution
The company signed a Microsoft®
Enterprise Client Access License Suite
agreement and deployed products such as
Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007
for improved workflow processes and
communication.
Benefits
 Greater employee productivity
 Improved business intelligence
 Reduced costs
 Increased sales
“Compiling and distributing accurate, up-to-date
information through our integrated Microsoft
environment … will help Jamba Juice take steps that
ensure greater overall profitability.”
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information Technology, Jamba Juice
Jamba Juice—a leading provider of healthy, on-the-go food and
beverages—viewed the economic slowdown as an opportunity to
assess its operations and improve efficiencies. The company
decided to invest in integrated technology tools that would help its
stores run more efficiently and streamline communication.
Therefore, Jamba Juice signed a Microsoft® Enterprise Client Access
License Suite agreement, saving 50 percent in software costs, and
deployed products such as Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server
2007 and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007. The
company already has seen improvements in its productivity, and it
expects to enhance its business intelligence capabilities for better
decision making. Overall, Jamba Juice anticipates that its use of
Microsoft products will result in increased profitability due to a
better ability to serve customers and decreased operational costs.
Situation
Jamba Juice provides real-fruit smoothies and
other healthy snacks for hungry customers
throughout the United States. The company
has enjoyed constant steady growth and is
working toward a goal of increasing its store
count. As of March 2009, Jamba Juice has
more than 700 stores, more than 500 of
which are company-owned, with the
remainder owned by franchisees. Some
Jamba Juice stores are located in traditional
shopping areas, while others are embedded
in grocery stores and airports.
The economic downturn caused the company
to slow its growth, reconsider its processes,
and look for efficiencies, with the idea that
these measures would poise Jamba Juice for
success upon an economic upswing.
Company decision makers viewed embracing
newer technology across Jamba Juice stores
as a way to support increased productivity
and, ultimately, profitability.
“Store managers in particular face aggressive
sales goals, which are especially difficult to
deliver on in today’s tough business climate,”
says Jeff Weinstein, Director of Operations
Development for Jamba Juice. “And they’ve
sometimes had to work to achieve those
goals without the technology resources that
would help them.”
Store managers at Jamba Juice historically
have had trouble finding the information that
they needed to effectively run their stores.
The company maintained what it called an
“originals” folder on the companywide shared
network drive. This folder contained more
than 1,000 documents that store managers
needed access to in order to manage the
business; everything from equipment
manuals and store directories to tax
information forms and marketing guides
could be found in the originals folder. Every
week or two, Jamba Juice corporate
employees would push out necessary
information to the field by placing it into the
originals folder. “It was a cumbersome,
unreliable process with no version control,”
says Weinstein. “Managers struggled to wade
through all the data and had no way of
knowing if the document they found was the
most accurate and up-to-date.”
The Need for Business Intelligence
Store managers also struggled to find the
time to manually update their stores’ profitand-loss and other key information that their
district and regional managers needed. Store
managers had to spend at least one to two
hours each week gathering and typing in data
that Jamba Juice wanted for business
intelligence and analysis purposes. Even
when the information was in the Jamba Juice
system, employees were uncertain about the
integrity of the data gathered because of
conflicting sets of metrics between store and
corporate resources.
Gathering business intelligence on a
corporate level—about everything from a
particular smoothie flavor’s popularity to
regional sales trends—was made more
difficult because of the mix of companyowned and franchise stores. “Things get
complicated when you’ve got a mix of store
ownership and therefore a mix of
technologies,” explains Robert Notte, Vice
President of Information Technology for
Jamba Juice. “But it’s critically important to
conduct data analysis to discern trends and
determine how to address and make the
most of the customer behavior patterns we
see. That kind of business intelligence can
inform our marketing decisions—such as
promoting certain menu items in certain
markets and/or during a specific time period,
thus enabling us to be more strategic in our
overall sales and marketing efforts.”
Inefficient Communications
Jamba Juice also saw room for improvement
in the communications between its corporate
offices and field stores. For example, Jamba
Juice offers catering services for
organizations such as schools or businesses
that may want a large number of smoothies
for a special event. “But our stores don’t have
any kind of customer relationship
management software to support their
catering sales and delivery efforts,” says
Weinstein.
Notte adds, “There’s no clear three-way
communication path for customers, store
employees, and our headquarters.” When a
customer calls, a store employee writes the
catering order on a piece of paper and later
types it into the store’s point-of-sale (POS)
terminal. The store employee must print and
fax the order and invoice to Jamba Juice
headquarters. “It’s not always clear where
things stand with a catering order, its
invoicing, and so on, which equates to a lot of
phoning and faxing between headquarters
and our stores,” says Notte.
Lack of workflow processes also resulted in
confusion when stores needed specialized
maintenance, such as plumbing and
electrical work. Headquarters and the stores
used paper mail for invoicing, and it was
always unclear who should issue the invoice
to the vendor. That uncertainty led to a lot of
time required for clarification, invoice
approvals, and so on. “Our lack of set
processes and consistency when it came to
vendor compensation presented a huge
opportunity to improve efficiency,” says
Notte.
More generally speaking, field employees
sometimes struggled due to a lack of visibility
among the many different corporate
departments at Jamba Juice. Problems arise
when these different departments all want to
promote their individual priorities, delivering
their own important information and making
their own demands of the company’s field
employees. “A store manager’s primary
responsibilities are to take care of customers
and team members and to build the store’s
business,” says Weinstein. “When multiple
corporate departments ask them to take on
new products, procedures, and campaigns,
the managers become overloaded.”
For example, Jamba Juice recently introduced
oatmeal as a new product in its stores. That
addition required store managers to change
their store setups, train team members, and
lead the initial efforts to promote the oatmeal
and deliver it satisfactorily. In the same week,
Jamba Juice human resources department
might have required store managers to
change the way that they administered
employee benefits, and managers also might
have been asked to change the way they
submitted a facilities work order to fix a
maintenance issue.
One corporate department had no way of
knowing its requests were coinciding with
simultaneous requests from other
departments. “We needed a way to meter
what we—as a whole—delivered to the field
and what we asked of them,” says Weinstein.
Overall, Jamba Juice wanted to minimize the
amount of time that store managers spent
dealing with non-customer-related activities
so that they could focus on customers’
experiences.
Solution
Jamba Juice determined that the time was
ripe to invest in new technologies and update
its IT capabilities. Jamba Juice believed that,
like taking the time to properly repair and
equip a boat when the weather’s bad for
fishing, it made sense to put systems and
processes in place that would help the
company be successful once the economic
outlook became brighter. “When the fish
begin to bite again, not only is that fisherman
ready, but with the improvements to his boat
and equipment, he’ll catch more fish than
“Giving Office
SharePoint Server 2007
capabilities to our field
store employees will
help them and their …
managers … learn from
each other and address
potential issues more
proactively.”
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information
Technology, Jamba Juice
ever before,” says Notte. “We believe that
putting the right technology in place does the
same thing for us in terms of future
profitability and employee productivity.”
Jamba Juice evaluated its technology options
and decided to embrace an integrated
environment based on Microsoft® products.
“We used Microsoft tools before the economy
went downhill, and we knew that we wanted
to take advantage of the broader range of
Microsoft product offerings,” says Notte. “The
recession timing was a great opportunity for
us to address our manual processes, lack of
workflow, and business intelligence issues
and support new functionality with Microsoft
products.”
The company started the process when it
signed a Microsoft Enterprise Client Access
License (ECAL) Suite agreement in December
2008 because of the wealth of products that
were included in the agreement. “The ECAL’s
continuous upgradability played a big role in
our signing it,” recalls Notte. “It was less
expensive for us to go with the agreement
than to buy a whole bunch of licenses and
find ourselves in the same situation again in
two to three years.” In addition, the company
liked the idea of spreading out predictable
payments over three years instead of paying
all at once for licenses up front.
Internal Portal Deployment
With the licensing agreement in place, Jamba
Juice began its software planning and
deployment process. The company used
Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as
the basis for JambaNet, an internal portal
that it launched in December 2008. The
initial phase of the portal includes
functionality such as weather forecasting to
help individual store managers see a local
five-day forecast and adjust their staff and
inventory accordingly. (The nicer the weather,
the more employees and product ingredients
are required to keep up with demand.)
The portal also encompasses mechanisms
for all communications between stores and
corporate headquarters, a company directory,
and centralized access to other sites and
applications frequently needed by employees,
such as a link to the Web pages for office
supply ordering, expense reimbursement,
and the results from Mystery Shopper, which
is a third-party service that shops Jamba
Juice stores and measures them on the
customer service criteria that the company
has identified as most important to its
success.
Jamba Juice is using the portal to reinforce
key companywide announcements. It also
can be used to launch new products and
marketing campaigns; recognize individual,
store, and district achievements; and share
customer feedback and store best practices.
In addition, the portal contains reports for
store, district, regional, and corporate
manager use, including profit-and-loss
reports, labor reports, and others. “Managers
now have vital data pertaining to their stores,
and a snapshot view of their stores’ sales
information, cost of goods, and performance
on payrolls and labor,” says Weinstein.
Messaging System Upgrade
Because it now has a licensing agreement in
place, Jamba Juice is working to upgrade
several parts of its existing infrastructure to
take advantage of new functionality and IT
management efficiencies. The company has
launched a pilot project involving Microsoft
products and some new hardware at a
handful of stores. If all goes as anticipated,
Jamba Juice plans to start the companywide
rollout in May 2009 and upgrade all its
company-owned stores by the end of October
2009. “Once we prove the business benefits
of upgrading, we’ll encourage our franchisees
to upgrade, too.”
“The Microsoft solutions
that we’re deploying will
increase employee
understanding and get
more people moving in
the same direction,
which will help us
increase the speed and
quality of our business.”
Robert Notte, Vice President of Information
Technology, Jamba Juice
As of April 2009, Jamba Juice is midway
through its upgrade to Microsoft Exchange
Server 2007. The company has set up one
server computer for its corporate
environment and another to serve its
company-owned stores. There are
approximately 200 corporate and field
management accounts and more than 1,000
store accounts, since each company-owned
store has two mailboxes. “We’ve purchased
the hardware and are building the new
Exchange Server 2007 environment,” says
Notte. “Once testing is complete, we’ll
migrate all our company-owned stores,
probably by the end of June 2009.
Future Functionality
Jamba Juice is conducting a pilot test of
Microsoft Forefront™ Client Security and
plans to implement it in all its company
stores. “Forefront Client Security gives us a
smaller antivirus footprint compared with
McAfee and other competitors,” says Notte.
The company also has extensive plans to
streamline operations using workflow
processes supported by Office SharePoint
Server 2007. Jamba Juice will, for example,
establish a catering workflow process and
one for handling employee paid time off, and
it also intends to integrate invoicing
processes into the Microsoft Dynamics® GP
business software system. Says Weinstein,
“One of our priorities for the next few months
is to enable employees to use the Office
SharePoint Server 2007 system to make it
easier for them to manage customer
relationships and grow their catering
business.”
Jamba Juice also plans to set up central
calendar management so that all store and
field activities are centralized and tied into
workflow processes. “We want to link all
communications that are sent from our
corporate office to our stores through one
central calendar so that everyone has
visibility into the full picture of what’s going
on. In that way, we can work together to
support, rather than overwhelm, those in the
field with our information and requests,” says
Weinstein.
Another of the company’s goals is to promote
greater information sharing by moving its
paper-based log of store activities to the
Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal. Before
leaving, an employee will record relevant
information as to what happened on his or
her shift so that the incoming shift employees
will have key details—perhaps related to the
equipment, the product ingredients, or a
customer—at their fingertips. “Giving Office
SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities to our
field store employees will help them and their
district and regional managers heighten their
awareness of what’s happening in the stores,
learn from each other, and address potential
issues more proactively,” says Notte.
Business intelligence is another area that
Jamba Juice aims to enhance, supported by
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server
2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Dashboard and alerting functionalities will
provide workers with a clear, easy-to-interpret
representation of their store’s performance
compared with other stores, regions, previous
months or years, and so on. For managers
and employees who need it, the business
intelligence features will contain in-depth
analysis capabilities as well.
The company identified training as yet
another area for improvement now that
Jamba Juice has implemented its business
productivity solutions. For example, all
company employees are required by law to
participate in workplace harassment training.
Jamba Juice has to pay for employees to go
to the nearest office service store, public
library, or home because employees currently
cannot access the training video from the
stores’ backrooms. “There’s all sorts of
“What used to take a
store manager 15
minutes to locate can
now be found in
seconds—with no more
uncertainty about it
being the right version.”
Jeff Weinstein, Director of Operations
Development, Jamba Juice
training we’d like employees to be able to
access through a Web browser right in the
stores,” says Notte. “In addition to legally
required training sessions, we’ll be able to
post training videos that show employees
how to use a new software application or
clean new equipment.” The company plans to
use Microsoft Office Communications Server
2007 and its Office Live Meeting functionality
to hold and record training sessions and
make them available later through Office
SharePoint Server 2007.
Benefits
Jamba Juice is indeed making great strides
toward efficiency that it hopes will pay big
dividends as the economy turns around. The
company continues to put in place measures
that will reduce operational costs, streamline
processes, improve business intelligence,
and help boost sales capabilities. “We’re
getting the tools that we need to plan and
execute more effectively,” says Notte. “The
Microsoft solutions that we’re deploying will
increase employee understanding and get
more people moving in the same direction,
which will help us increase the speed and
quality of our business.”
Greater Employee Productivity
Jamba Juice employees are already finding
that they need to spend less time in the back
of the store, away from customers. For
instance, they now can locate the documents
that they need because the “originals” folder
no longer exists. Instead, store managers use
the Enterprise Search capabilities in Office
SharePoint Server 2007. “We were able to
review all the documentation and reduce it by
half, mostly by removing outdated versions,”
says Weinstein. “Then we put the remaining
accurate information on JambaNet so that
employees can quickly and easily search for
exactly what they need. What used to take a
store manager 15 minutes to locate can now
be found in seconds—with no more
uncertainty about it being the right version.”
Employees also will be spending significantly
less time on manual processes. “Previously,
store managers spent approximately 15
hours per week on administrative tasks. We
intend to make the most of our Office
SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities and
ultimately reduce that number by half,” says
Weinstein. “We’ll be saving time that didn’t
used to add value. Instead, employees will be
empowered to invest that time in people by
training team members and in building the
business. When you multiply 5 to 10 hours of
more intelligently invested time per week by
500 store managers and 52 weeks, that’s a
very significant gain.”
Improved Business Intelligence
Jamba Juice is about to introduce a
dashboard on JambaNet that shows store
managers their status with regard to key
performance indicators (KPIs). “Each
homepage will show a snapshot of the
metrics that are most important to Jamba
Juice and that we use to evaluate a
manager’s performance,” explains Weinstein.
“At any given time, store managers can view
the health of their stores. They’ll also know
that their district and regional managers,
along with company executives, all are
looking at the same information, which
makes it much easier for a district manager
to have a productive conversation with a
store manager about targeting the right
goals.”
Now that the company has greater access to
its business analytics, it can make smarter
decisions on everything from managing shifts
to handling promotions. “Compiling and
distributing accurate, up-to-date information
through our integrated Microsoft environment
gives everyone, including individual store
managers, useful, trustworthy status
information that will help district managers
hold store managers accountable and will
help Jamba Juice take steps that ensure
greater overall profitability,” says Notte.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Jamba Juice
products and services, call (510) 5960100, or visit the Web site at:
www.jambajuice.com
Reduced Costs and Increased Sales
Jamba Juice believes that its investment in
Microsoft products is helping it reduce its
operational costs. “I expect that we’ll save 50
percent in software costs over six years by
signing the ECAL agreement,” says Notte. But
the savings don’t end there. “Even the little
things add up. For instance, we’re using less
paper and incurring fewer shipping costs, and
we’re finding ways for employees to get more
done while they’re at work so that we don’t
have to pay for them to spend extra time on
things like training.”
The company also is putting in place the tools
that employees need to increase their stores’
selling potential. “Just simplifying the catering
workflow for employees—making things more
consistent, less manual, and more
streamlined—will motivate stores to seek
more outside catering sales because they’re
less onerous and frustrating to deal with,”
says Notte. “And having drill-down analysis
capabilities will lead to improved sales
because each store will be able to identify its
slowest and busiest times and adjust staffing
and purchasing accordingly. Having that kind
of visibility also enables managers to identify
and act on opportunities for greater
profitability.”
Software and Services
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
 Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office Communications
Server 2007

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published April 2009
Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
With infrastructure optimization, you can
build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic
core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall
IT costs, make better use of resources, and
become a strategic asset for the business.
The Infrastructure Optimization model—with
basic, standardized, rationalized, and
dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft
using industry best practices and Microsoft’s
own experiences with enterprise customers.
The Infrastructure Optimization model
provides a maturity framework that is flexible
and easily used as a benchmark for technical
capability and business value.
For more information about Microsoft
infrastructure optimization, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businessproductivity
− Microsoft Office PerformancePoint
Server 2007
− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
 Microsoft Forefront
− Microsoft Forefront Client Security
 Microsoft Dynamics
− Microsoft Dynamics GP