New product brings branch-level intelligence to the QSR, retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries across the Philippines and Southeast Asia
TAGUIG, Philippines — September 4, 2026 — Sprout Solutions has launched Frontliner, an AI-powered operations platform that gives multi-location businesses in retail, F&B, hospitality, and healthcare real-time visibility into what's happening across every branch, replacing the paper checklists, spreadsheets, and group chats frontline teams rely on today. Frontliner is built for businesses where the real work happens in a branch, not a boardroom. Frontliner is Sprout's first product outside its core HR and payroll suite.
The problem: a branch running on five disconnected tools
Frontliner targets a specific problem: companies that have digitized payroll, compliance, and HR can still find themselves running branch operations on WhatsApp or Viber group chats, paper checklists, and Excel files. A store manager at a QSR chain with 20 locations might use five different tools on any given shift:
● a form on paper
● a tracker in Google Sheets
● a group chat on Viber
● a separate training platform
● a ticketing tool for equipment repairs
But none of them talk to each other.
One platform for the entire branch
Frontliner replaces that stack with a single platform. Staff complete checklists, report issues with a photo, and take training courses entirely from their phones, with no desktop required, and no separate app for learning.
● Training on demand. The LMS generates a full training course, slides and quiz included, from a topic description or an uploaded SOP; a crew member can finish a food safety module between the breakfast and lunch rush.
● Audits that close themselves. When an audit fails, the system auto-generates a corrective action plan and creates real tasks with real assignees. A failed temperature check becomes an assigned corrective task before the auditor leaves the building.
● Issues triaged automatically. When a crew member reports a broken fryer with a photo, AI classifies it as Equipment Failure, sets the priority to High, and starts the four-hour SLA clock without anyone making a decision.
An Operational Health Score, and a brief every morning
At the operations level, Frontliner computes an Operational Health Score for each branch and for the company as a whole. A 0-to-100 composite of checklist completion, audit pass rates, issue resolution, attendance, task completion, and training progress.
Every morning, Sidekick generates a daily brief for managers and operations directors; not a report to scroll through, but two or three specific findings with a recommended action each:
"Makati's food waste pull-outs are 60% above their four-week average and the top reason is chicken overproduction on Mondays. BGC's fryer has had three equipment issues this month; two incident reports flagged an oil leak."
The brief reads the entire operation overnight so the manager doesn't have to spend the first hour of their day figuring out what's on fire.
"Companies don't usually have a standards problem. The challenge is knowing whether those standards are actually being executed across every branch, every shift, every day. We built Frontliner to give operations leaders that visibility, wherever they are."
— Kat Uytiepo, Venture Lead for Frontliner
"Our clients in retail, F&B, and hospitality kept asking the same question after they got HR and payroll working. The back office is sorted. What about the branch? What about the people running the floor every day?"
— Alex Gentry, Co-founder of Sprout
Built for the floor, not the office
The gap Gentry is pointing at is older than the software that's closing it. Knowledge workers have spent a decade accumulating digital tools such as project management, communication, documentation, analytics. The person at a desk has options. The crew member at a QSR counter, the nurse on a ward, the warehouse picker on the night shift have largely been handed a clipboard and a group chat and told to figure it out. The tools that exist were designed for offices, then stretched to fit operations they were never built for.
For Gentry, the real product question was never about replacing paper:
"How can AI make the people on the floor more productive? How do you help teams actually gel together, and not simply give management another report to look at from above?"
Frontliner is her answer to that: a platform built from the ground up for how frontline teams actually work: on mobile, in a branch, under time pressure, with no desk in sight.
Industry templates, live in about 30 minutes
The product includes industry-specific template packages covering QSR, restaurants and cafes, fashion retail, grocery, hospitality, logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare. Each package includes pre-built checklists, audits, issue categories, automated workflows, and training modules based on how operators in that vertical already run their branches. A new customer in QSR can be operational in about 30 minutes.
As shared by an IlaoIlao franchise, a Frontliner client:
As shared by Jennifer Castro, Area Manager of llaollao, a fast-growing frozen yogurt brand in the Philippines and now a Frontliner user:
"Simple lang gamitin yung app kaya mabilis siyang natutunan ng managers at staff. Syempre may konting adjustment coming from paper checklists, pero after a few days naging part na siya ng daily routine nila. Nakatuwa kasi instead na dumagdag sa trabaho nila, mas pinadali pa niya.”
Integration, pricing, and availability
Frontliner integrates with Sprout HR and Sprout Payroll:
● Attendance data flows to payroll automatically.
● Employee records sync without a manual import.
For companies not yet on the Sprout platform, Frontliner works as a standalone product.
Pricing is per location with unlimited users, which is a deliberate choice for an industry where headcount is high and per-seat pricing tends to price out the operators who need it most.
Frontliner is available now. More information at sproutfrontliner.com.
