3 FEBRUARY 2012

The Northern Health and Social Care Trust

A detailed tender process resulted in The Northern Health and Social Care Trust (NHSCT) appointing MCR Systems as their chosen EPOS provider.

NHSCT is one of five health trusts in Northern Ireland and the largest geographically, providing services from nine different hospitals.

NHSCT catering services department had a number of key requirements that necessitated the procurement of a new catering management information system:

• To Increase productivity, and continual efficiency demands on the service
• To standardise systems, operations and processes
• To Improve planning, management and control of catering operations with greater accuracy due to timely and concise information
• The catering department's main activities and the nature of the information needed to aid management governance had changed

Symphony Enterprise, hosted by MCR Systems now provides the Trust with the tools to manage product data and tariffs across all the catering outlets from one single database. Symphony enables collaborative working with data held centrally, so all authorised users in the organisation can access relevant information via the internet, delivering better communication and processes.

SymPOS Tills have been installed across the estate facilitating a real-time flow of sales and financial information into the Symphony Reporting engine and digital dashboard which provides a snapshot of business efficiency through various key performance indicators

The benefits to date have included:

• Flexibility to add and amend new products for sale in the various catering outlets within NHSCT
• Flexibility to tailor the screen design and products on each individual till within the various catering outlets
• Better sales analysis and itemisation of product sales
• Tighter controls and improved audit trails for all sales transactions
• A comprehensive suite of management reports