The Background
Seagram Spirits and Wine Group manage a portfolio of over 350 properties in 37 countries, including more than 100 meeting rooms. They had a number of buildings in the UK, the most prominent of which is “The Ark” in London, which has approx. 15 meeting rooms with state of the art facilities such as video conferencing. These meeting rooms across their portfolio are available to all staff.
The Problem
There was a high level of complaints about meeting room unavailability and over booking of meeting rooms for different meetings at the same time. It was difficult to arrange off site room booking. The cost of maintaining the facilities was very high and the available resources had to be maintained and managed effectively. Expense tracking was extremely difficult and it was impossible to get figures for room utilisation and costs.
The Solution
ION Information Technologies Ltd. designed and developed Resource-i, a hosted web-based application, giving access via the Internet to all authorised staff to book the required resources. This includes the booking of services such as special equipment, car parking, catering and other applicable resources. The application also incorporates cost centre charging to enable tracking and managing the revenue generated and costs incurred. The application also supports the booking of hot desks and help desks, also the booking of residential accommodation.
Resource-i facilitates planning and decision-making by providing up to date and timely information on resource availability and enables the efficient usage of these resources.
The Benefits
- Internet based booking, giving access to resources anywhere, and at anytime
- Efficient internal costing mechanism (cost centre charging)
- Cost reduction by increasing administrative efficiency
- Elimination of double booking
- Productivity metrics reports to enable the senior management to monitor the usage of the resources and plan accordingly
- Ancillary service automation (catering, parking, equipment, etc.)
- Facilitates better financial, operational and decision making capabilities
- Fully hosted & supported