The internal study found, among other things, that people in various steps in the process -- such as internal employees, real estate agents and contract managers -- had to spend significant time searching for information before handing it off to the next person in the chain.

Great Clips officials decided to automate its processes using Metastorm Inc.'s eWork business process management (BPM) suite and Interwoven Inc.'s MailSite Document Management suite. Meta-storm's BPM suite is designed to support design, integration and deployment of new internal procedures while integrating them into existing applications and systems.

For the first phase of the project, from July 2004 to July 2005, Great Clips developers used the Metastorm tool to automate and streamline the course of action for opening a new salon. Prior to completing the first phase, the 120-step process included eight specialized roles and 50 users.

Automation let Great Clips eliminate 20 of those steps. The most important result, Waldo said, was eliminating the steps that required people to wait for "days up to two weeks for information that was already in the building."

The project required significant effort from Great Clips developers working with the third-party tools, Waldo noted.