Five go live

TGI Friday's

Having raised the standard of front of house with the help of intensive and structured customer awareness programmes to a level envied by the industry, TGI Friday's turned its attention to the back of house preparation areas. The question raised was how to ensure the speed of service was consistent.

The operation already has a Micros point-of-sale system, which prints orders remotely to the preparation areas, thereby saving time for service staff. The next logical step would be to enhance the prep operation and provide meaningful and helpful "tools" to the chef, for overall control on the performance of this area.

SOS (Speed of Service) was born with the help of the Micros research and development team, based in the USA. The team worked with TGI Friday's management to develop a touch-screen kitchen monitor, to give the chef an instant update on the status of an order.

Each part of an order - for example, starter, hot/cold, main course and side orders, which are prepared in different sections of the kitchen - is displayed separately on the monitor.

Times could now be logged to these orders and criteria set for when they should be executed. For example, all starters should be expedited in seven minutes; any order not meeting this deadline is then flashed in red, warning the controller and indicating where action and help is needed in the preparation chain.

This gives the chef a complete understanding of the volume and pressure in each preparation area of the kitchen. He or she can now direct operations and move resources around to meet the demands.

Analysis of the meal period can plot how well the criteria are met. Staffing levels and schedules can be better prepared, and delayed orders can be reviewed to find any common factors, so that action can be taken to eliminate them.

The system is now a standard feature in all new TGI Friday's installations.

Beardmore Hotel

The innovative Beardmore Hotel, Glasgow, with 168 bedrooms, opened in June. Health Care International built the hotel alongside its state-of-the-art hospital, to cater for patients needing pre-operative tests before going into hospital, and for post-treatment convalescing. The hotel is open to patients' families and friends as well as commercial conference business.

Sulcus fully integrated software is used throughout the complex, and LANmark is running in the front office. LANmark sales and catering management system keeps control of conference reservations.

The interfaces include Vingcard Key Locking, and TMS and Connex for in-house movies. Eight Squirrel point-of-sale touch-screen terminals are installed in the restaurants and bars in the hotel. Squirrel Food and Beverage management system controls the purchasing and receiving requirements.

The hardware configuration is immense, with hundreds of users on the network. The advanced technology throughout the whole complex was chosen following a review of suppliers and contractors from the UK and overseas.

Mount Royal Hotel

The 700-bedroom Mount Royal Hotel, London, chose Squirrel point of sale to replace an ageing EPoS system. The installation incorporated five touch-screen terminals, five thermal bill printers and three order printers.

Richard Bryson, the hotel's financial controller, says he is delighted with the installation, and that the reporting facilities have helped him and food and beverage manager Allan Agerholm highlight areas requiring attention and stricter control. Both agree that the Squirrel touch-screen terminal's ease of use has simplified staff training needs.

A two-way interface has been written between Squirrel and the new Champs front desk system, to enable direct posting of charges, with name verification, on to residents' bills.

The next step, in progress as Caterer went to press, is to install Check - another Sulcus product - for stock control. This will be fully interfaced with Squirrel.

CT Bowring & Co Ltd

Pabulum Consultants has installed a complete cashless payment and catering control solution running on IBM hardware at CT Bowring & Co, one of the largest insurance brokers in the City. The installation covers the company's staff catering and hospitality facilities across five sites.

One of the main issues of importance to Bowring was the automation of its internal billing procedures for corporate entertaining. Billing was a time-consuming manual process involving a great deal of cross-checking of information between personnel, salaries and accounts.

Pabulum worked with BET, the on-site caterer at Bowring, to develop the Bookmaster table and room booking system, which is fully integrated with Pabulum's Posmaster PC-based till system.

Details of staff allowed to entertain are held within the Pabulum Posmaster PC-based software and polled by Bookmaster when a reservation is made. After entertaining, the staff member presents a card, which is swiped at the Posmaster till, to charge the value of the meal to that person's company and department.

Posmaster produces an itemised invoice for the accumulated totals for each company, which is sent to the relevant accounts section. The next stage will involve the integration of Posmaster with the accounts system, providing a completely automated system.

Other Pabulum cashless system clients include European Bank, Hertfordshire University, ITN and the London Underwriting Centre.

Chewton Glen

Chewton Glen, in New Milton, Hampshire, is the UK's only privately owned five-red-star hotel. It has 58 bedrooms, a health and leisure club, a nine-hole golf course, conference centre with the latest audio-visual equipment and an award-winning restaurant and wine cellar.

When selecting a computer system for the operation, management paid particular attention to the quality of the system being bought, and to the quality of support they were likely to receive.

A third important factor was the system's ability to store detailed guest history information and its ability to produce a variety of marketing mailshots from the information held in its database.

Chewton Glen chose the IGS Hotel system from Global Hospitality and has now been using the system for more than a year and a half.

Michael Purtill, deputy general manager, says: "We now have a database containing over 40,000 client records and we mailshot a newsletter to 20,000 people three times a year. In addition, we run a series of targeted promotional mailshots.

"We are able to highlight on our database our clients' interests and we can therefore keep them informed of any specific events or packages we may be promoting. We can also track how much business such promotions produce for us.

"For example, between August 1993 and August 1994 I know that these targeted mailshots accounted for 7.8% of our total room nights for that period."

Michael Purtill, who this year received Caterer & Hotelkeeper's Acorn Award, presented to 30 people under 30, is enthusiastic about the service he has received from Global Hospitality: "The initial training and installation was excellent and the quality of support we have received has been superb."