Anyone who has read more than one book on management knows the term ‘delegation’.

Google and Wikipedia are still accessible to all, so in short, delegation is a principle of assignment of responsibility or authority to other people in lower levels of corporate hierarchy to carry out specific activities, in which they are competent. Aside from other additional bonuses, such as motivation growth and responsibility of personnel, this allows to make fast and competent decisions.
Thus, it’s reasonable to expect that if decisions on customer policy are made by people working with those customers on a daily basis, then those decisions will have much better quality, than if they are made by some aging senior vice-president for strategic marketing in customer relations in between his midday coffee and afternoon golf.

This is exactly the logic that is used by Just in their everyday activities – they delegate total independence in commercial activities within their regions to their regional stores (Voronezh, Kazan, Nizhniy Novgorod – as of
December, 2010).

Refusal to delegate authority is usually based on fear of losing control. And it’s not in vain – considering traditional sense of justice of the Russian population and the growing efficiency of law enforcement.
Capabilities of the system exclude that risk: all the stores in the chain work in a single informational space within the Ultimate and according to strictly standardized business processes that are supervised from the headquarters.
The main office can see online all the transactions in general and of each store. A store, however, can only see what’s under its own supervision, and nothing more. A 100% total control.
Yet, it takes only about two hours to add a new store to the system. Compare that with the time (and finances) it takes to work with a geographically-distributed system.

Having said that, the branches enjoy a complete freedom in setting their own prices, putting together a product range, and in engaging customers. The branch manager is responsible to the main office for achieving general economic indicators – and that’s what interests beneficiaries of a business in the first place.
Is this effective? Yes. Who, if not the locals, would get into the nitty-gritty of the local market situation? Who, if not them, would have the best chances to make quick and correct decisions? And please note, with zero risks of losing control.

This is how we, together with our customers, make maximum use of the synergy of advanced management concepts with IT innovations, enriching each other (in all senses).

One great property of a good idea – besides providing a solution to a specific problem, which contributed to
its birth – is that opens up new and unexpected horizons.
Same here.
On the basis of this well-proven branch management technology, Just is planning to launch a franchising project in the nearest future.

Why not? Everything is in place. The level of business processes standards is hardly inferior to that of McDonalds, the IT system capabilities allow the company to grow almost infinitely, while the growth itself will be financed by franchisees.