TRICAT Instrumental In Streamlining Military Catering Operation

Fretwell-Downing Hospitality (FDH) is a leading supplier of food service management software systems, with a long and successful track record of working with large-scale catering organisations on an international basis.

The UK-based company has successfully delivered systems to contract catering companies such as Elior, ISS and Aramark, retail operations including the National Trust and a host of cost sector clients in education, health and custodial environments.

FDH has also built a solid reputation within the military arena for providing software solutions which are proving instrumental in streamlining and increasing the efficiency of the military catering management process.

FDH has worked with the UK’s Ministry of Defence and with the Defence Food Services-IPT for many years and the TRICAT software management system is now being installed worldwide within all deployed operational units.

Based on standard Microsoft technology, TRICAT is an Access based site-deployed solution with the ability to cover the full range of activities from stock management, supply chain procurement, recipe and menu planning, kitchen production routines, sales and meal uptakes and full financial reporting. TRICAT also has powerful reporting capabilities, designed to match and enhance the specific needs of military catering activities, and covering many special accounting policies including Daily Messing Rates(DMR),endurance capabilities.

The Royal Navy has used TRICAT since 1998, where the system has been installed on ruggedised laptops and local area networks across the fleet, including submarines, Royal Fleet Auxiliary and the supply chain to remote locations.

More recently, the Defence Food Services Intergrated Project Team has streamlined the different Catering Acounting Provisioning systems used by the Royal Navy, Army and RAF and filled the gap for a land-based operational system, by rolling out TRICAT across the three services. Currently the system is deployed across 320 sites including Gibraltar, Iraq and Afghanistan and another 100 sites are soon to be added such as Belize the Falkland Islands, Canada and Brunei.

With TRICAT, the accuracy of Out of Barracks catering has been improved significantly. For instance, historically there would be a tendency for operational locationsto over-order, which in-turn led to inefficiencies and extra costs throughout the supply chain, including transport and the need for additional storage facilities. Through TRICAT, the process of ration ordering has become automated, allowing staff to order only those rations required by the menu cycle based upon numbers fed.

The system has also vastly improved the management information reporting, allowing greater budgetary control resulting in substantial cost savings, and forecasting based on accurately measured outputs and trends. A reduction of the current DMR costs by 1p would produce an estimated saving of £370,000 per annum, with further potential reductions identified.

Brigadier David Martin, Director Logistics (Commodities) comments: “TRICAT has been instrumental in helping transform and improve the efficiency of our foodservice operation, right from supplier through to user.

“As well as automating the production planning, we are now also equipped with more accurate management information, providing, for instance a greater insight into DMR spending and stock holding, that has created further opportunities to reduce the operational food supply budget. In short, we can now project forces into any area for a given duration knowing the exact feeding requirement and costs.”

Working in partnership with DFS-IPT, Fretwell-Downing Hospitality has developed a new version of TRICAT that also delivers full nutritional analysis capabilities – a module that will be implemented across the 3 Services. Using the McCance & Widdowson food tables, TRICAT can now provide full nutritional analysis of a plate, tray or meal, or indeed a full menu cycle for a given deployment. The inputs can also be monitored against specific guidelines defined by, for example, training establishment needs for high intakes and the nutritional requirements for hot and cold climates.

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