Installing a sophisticated management information system has increased the business reports for the Highland Council’s catering staff, giving them much greater insight into the department’s performance at any one moment in time and enhanced decision-making to ultimately improve the bottom line.

 

On the face of it, the task of increasing the efficiency of a local authority catering service that covers an area which is not only equivalent in size to Belgium but is also twice as remote, may have been a tall order.  However this is what the Highlands Council faced when it sought to replace the mountains of paperwork and excel spreadsheets, and improve the level of reporting.

 

In this situation it may have been easy to dismiss the latest technology because of the remoteness of some of the sites, but the Highland Council approached the Digital Highland Programme Board and successfully made a case for installing Fretwell-Downing Hospitality’s (FDH) management information system Saffron Spice.

 

The catering division was no stranger to management information systems, having already charted several years of using a previous FDH system, MICa. However this was now out-moded and the local authority’s catering staff relied more heavily on excel spreadsheets linked to the Access system to deliver reports – a system that was proving cumbersome and increasingly unreliable.

 

Through Saffron Spice, the Council’s catering service would be using a new generation of management information system, which is internet-based and accessed via a password-controlled website.

 

Designed specifically for the hospitality sector, Saffron is geared specifically to provide line-by-line reporting on core business and performance, including uptake, production and unit costs, stock control, recipe and menu management, labour, sales, purchases and nutritional analysis.

 

The system simplifies the retrieval and analysis of essential business intelligence, both in terms of data being entered far more easily, and automating much of the report-generation.

 

At the Highland Council, the catering service has almost 200 outlets predominantly providing school meals but also welfare and other external services including leisure centre catering. The service is operated from the head office in Inverness with four satellite offices across the Highlands.

 

From the outset, the catering division had a clear idea of the detail it wanted from the incoming system – a vitally important consideration, the catering and cleaning services manager Norma Murray believes.

 

She explains: “Ultimately it was the need to streamline our back office procedures that was a real driver. The volume of paperwork was immense and we knew we needed to replace the piles of excel spreadsheets which had to be compiled into one document, and the Access system which didn’t meet the full reporting requirement.

 

“With such a significant investment and the breadth of information that Saffron can provide, we had to focus on what data and type of reports we required. Timescales and keeping within the budget were also critical to the success of the project. 

 

“This approach was reinforced by FDH, who, rather than advising a standard local authority catering solution, instead guided us on best practice and then encouraged us to think about what we required and how the system could be tailored to match.”

                                                                                                               

As Saffron is internet-based, the council decided which members of the team would use the system, with password-protected areas established according to the level of information and access needed. For instance, staff at each site needed to enter the weekly returns data, while head office and area managers would need wider access to the system to analyse the data and reports.

 

With the new system, the catering  service now has 12 performance  reports that the team can study, including nutritional analysis of the meals, stock levels and food costs, whereas any reports previously would have purely been financially-based.

 

There is also in-built flexibility within the reports to produce variations based on specific business properties (ie: area and regions). By dropping the Saffron report data into an excel spreadsheet non-Saffron information can then also be added.

 

Norma explains the benefits they are seeing: “Saffron is a valuable resource, with the ability to analyse the data, and to inform the decision-making process.  We have changed our working practices significantly as a result. For instance we are now starting to receive weekly returns on the Friday via the web page rather than having to wait for the post before data is then re-keyed in at head office.

 

“Importantly, Saffron is also helping with other issues such as staff – we can now analyse how much business a particular school has been generating before deciding whether to replace a member of staff that has left that site.

 

“Whereas before we would have spent a lot of time checking the spreadsheet data, Saffron now automatically flags up areas of the business that are ‘out-of-the-norm’. If, say, a school has served 20 more meals than normal, we can investigate quickly to check whether there is a genuine reason for the increase or if a figure has been inputted incorrectly. The addition of the comment box in some cases eliminates the need for further investigation – as the reasons for any ‘out of the norm’ numbers can be provided there.”

 

In the current climate of high food inflation, keeping tabs on menu costings is proving extremely beneficial, particularly when just 1p increase per meal can wipe an extra £30,000 off the bottom line.

 

Through Saffron, not only is the Highland Council now able to show detailed costings and stock levels, but also produce costed menus and recipe books that each operating site can use.

 

“It is essential to maintain the system, but various members of the team have been trained thoroughly according to how they will use the system and we now have a clear hierarchy of who does what, and who has access to the various sections,” Norma comments.

 

FDH’s sales director Andrew Markwell adds: “The Highland Council’s experience of Saffron Spice shows how important it is to work closely in partnership with the client to ensure that the objectives are clearly defined. It is important to maintain this relationship, even beyond the system’s installation so that the client gains maximum benefit from their investment.”

 

Highlands Case Study (Acrobat Reader Required)