8 JANUARY 2010

ISS Mediclean tunes up for retail with MCR Systems

ISS Mediclean, leading providers of catering services to the healthcare sector, selected the formidable Symphony system to roll out across over their estate of over 60 sites

A service provider gearing-up for retail

Formed in 1984, ISS Mediclean is one of the leading hospital support service suppliers in the U.K.. The company employs over 13,000 people and provides services such as catering, cleaning, housekeeping, porters, security, car parking and estate management to more than 300 NHS units.

However, to meet customer expectations, the company’s catering operations have changed radically in recent years: nowadays they are viewed not so much as a ‘service’ but rather as a series of retail outlets tasked to deliver ‘high street’ standards of quality, choice and value.  As such, the company recognised the urgent need to be able to access accurate sales data and management information, to provide its catering managers with the same tools that are at the disposal of their High Street counterparts – tools without which it would be impossible to react adequately to buying trends and trading inconsistencies, thereby compromising performance.

Tough criteria: the search for an EPOS partner

ISS Mediclean concluded that a robust EPOS system was required to provide that information and more. Consequently, the search began to identify a supplier that was at the forefront of web-based technology and could demonstrate a formidable track record of delivering EPOS solutions to the hospitality marketplace.

The search that led to the appointment of MCR Systems was exhaustive, as Dave Bray, Mediclean’s Information Systems Manager recalled: “our ‘long list’ consisted of ten suppliers”, Dave said, “but our criteria dictated that several fell at the first hurdle. First and foremost, we were looking for a company that understood the specific requirements of our diverse catering outlets and had ‘hands-on’ experience in retail. We felt that, without such experience, we wouldn’t achieve the functionality in our system that we were looking for.

We needed an able and dedicated software development team capable of specifying and delivering bespoke solutions that addressed our particular requirements, including an interface with other critical catering control systems. We wanted a support team with a nationwide geographical spread. We also wanted astute project management and consultancy to ensure smooth deployment. You might say it was a ‘Big Ask’.”

It was certainly a ‘Big Ask’: one criterion in particular ensured that the successful company would be required to break new technological ground. ”Let’s just say that we’d had exposure to externally hosted EPOS before,” Dave said ruefully, ”and getting the tills to communicate from our secure network to a third party proved very challenging. That’s why we took the decision to insist on self-hosting.”

A shortlist of three companies emerged from the initial selection process and went on to contest what Dave Bray referred to as ‘a beauty parade’ for a working party of senior ISS managers. ”Having completed that stage”, he said, “we fleshed out the detailed cost proposals into a business case and approached the Board of Directors.” It was in April 2008 that the ‘white smoke’ of decision rose and MCR Systems was appointed. The completed deal involved ISS Mediclean purchasing MCR Systems’ formidable Symphony Enterprise system.

Deployment

“We chose an existing site at St. Mary’s Hospital in West London as our pilot when we began deployment in June 2008”, Dave recalls, ”followed by our operations at the Hammersmith and Charing Cross hospitals. Since then, we’ve rolled out to ten sites consisting of twenty three outlets; from full-scale restaurants to coffee shops and the deployment will continue until all of our catering outlets – there are around sixty all told – come under the auspices of the system.”

Challenges

”You expect to encounter challenges in any major IT roll-out and it’s in those circumstances that the mettle of your technical partners is tested”, said Dave, “and MCR’s team proved their worth.” The challenges encountered during the project concerned up-dated environments and uncovering features that offered opportunities for improvement. “The team took everything in their stride and nothing was too much trouble”, Dave said.

Benefits

"Symphony Enterprise is the best system we’ve deployed in a long while. More of our people have requested access to the system than we anticipated and the digital dashboard, which provides up to the minute updates on selected key performance indicators, is proving a real boon to the business. The sales activity reports help us to plan accurately and monitor performance and the nature of the system with its ‘see all, tell all’ attributes means that there’s little scope for fraudulent activity and that’s a valuable benefit."

Dave Bray,Mediclean’s Head of IT

"We’re already seeing revenue increasing through the tills and extrapolated across the business, we are looking at a significant improvement in sales and profitability and we have calculated that the system will have paid for itself within three years."

Andy Jones, Product Development Director at ISS Mediclean