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As a hospitality brand, communicating design changes to your hotel franchises can be a complicated and time-consuming process. However, with Fohlio as your one source of truth for design & procurement, and specification needs, you can streamline the process of approvals, brand approval, design approval, management approval, and more.
Fohlio helps hospitality brands provide consistently superior and memorable experiences that represent their identity and values. It’s a collaborative workspace for designers, purchasers, and third-party team members, making it easier to centralize data and standardize specifications. With a single source of truth, enforcing brand standards and reducing procurement costs become simpler than ever.
So how can Fohlio help with the approval process and brand approval management? Here are some steps to follow:
1. Define your brand guidelines and approval process.
Before starting the approval process, it’s crucial to establish clear brand guidelines and approval processes. Define who needs to give approvals and at what stages of the design process they need to do so. This helps to avoid confusion and reduce delays.
Approval management ensures that each decision or design element is thoroughly reviewed and approved before proceeding with implementation.
The first step is to define the roles within your organization who are responsible for the ultimate brand approval. This could include senior management, designers, purchasers, or even third-party members.
You can set up specific permissions for each kind of role in the team, which will save you the trouble of creating new accesses for each new invitee.
Once these roles have been identified, create a detailed oversight system which requires them to sign off on any changes or updates prior to implementation.
Fohlio is a cloud-based software that provides a central hub design and procurement decisions. This allows you to easily monitor progress in real time because all your stakeholders are in the same place.
It's also important to establish certain criteria upon which changes must be evaluated such as budget constraints or customer feedback. Customer surveys can inform specific areas where further investment may be necessary or improvements can be made. Having a clear set of criteria will help maintain efficiency within the approval process and ensure that only quality designs make it through the process before being implemented for final use.
2. Use Fohlio to share design changes and get approvals.
Fohlio allows you to share design changes with designers, purchasers, and management, making it easier to get approvals from the right people at the right time. You can create and manage project timelines and track the progress of design changes to ensure they’re completed on time.
In other words, you want to make sure that all the stakeholders involved in the design approval process are in the system and given the appropriate permissions.
Next, you want to have all your proposed product alternatives in the system, as well as the existing items that are already in the hotel’s brand standard. You can create two separate columns with the necessary actions required. For existing materials, you can provide options like “keep” or “discard.” For new products, “approve” or “reject.”
Fohlio allows designers to easily submit design changes to the platform where they can be reviewed by both internal stakeholders and external vendors. Approvals are managed in one central place, making it easier to ensure that brand standards are adhered to at all times.
3. Streamline the approval process.
Fohlio’s approval management process allows you to send out approval requests to the relevant stakeholders and track their progress. You can see who has approved, who hasn’t, and send out reminders to ensure the process is completed as quickly as possible.
Fohlio also supports a streamlined review process which allows designers to assign tasks and obtain sign-offs from multiple team members quickly without having to manually contact each person individually.
Remember those two columns we mentioned: You’ll have to make one set each for every approver. If you arrange all these columns in one dashboard, you’ll be able to instantly see which approver still has not provided their input and follow up with them.
4. Ensure compliance with brand guidelines.
Fohlio makes it easy to ensure compliance with brand guidelines by providing a centralized location for all brand specifications. Everyone involved in the approval process has access to the same information, so there’s no room for miscommunications or mistakes.
Include a detailed set of design approvals that define what constitutes acceptable designs for each hotel property. This should include specifications such as colors, materials, and textures that are in line with the brand’s overall look and feel. Once these standards have been established, they should be communicated clearly to all team members involved in the design process.
If you already have a brand matrix, these guidelines likely already exist. You can make this visible in Fohlio for all the approvers by putting them into a specific field and including that field in the approval dashboard.
If you don’t have these guidelines yet, go ahead and create them. Make them as specific and descriptive as possible in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Fohlio is the best tool for communicating design changes and streamlining the approval management process. By defining your brand guidelines and approval process, using Fohlio to share design changes and get approvals, and streamlining the approval management process, you can ensure that your brand standards are consistently upheld across all of your properties. With Fohlio, you can reduce delays, lower procurement costs, and create memorable experiences for your guests wherever they travel, rest, work, and play.
