High-tech Holiday Inn

The Holiday Inn Birmingham is to be rebranded in April, following a £4m upgrade, as a Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, the top specification in the franchise.

Some of the key decisions on upgrading information technology systems have already been made. Remanco's Vision 2 restaurant system is being put in this month, and the LANmark front-desk system will be installed in May.

But John O'Malley, the hotel's general manager, and Richard Grime, deputy manager, were open to ideas for new systems that could be installed, and were impressed by several on show at the Technology & Business Centre.

At the FSD (CADD Services) stand, Mr O'Malley liked FSD Enquirer. This CD-Rom package offers technical drawings of 25,500 items of catering equipment from 65 suppliers, which can be incorporated into kitchen planners' schemes. He saw this as a big advance on switching between diskettes from separate suppliers.

FSD managing director Paul Byrne explained that the library of drawings could also be used to generate a purchasing list to accompany the planner's scheme.

Mr O'Malley quickly saw the potential this package offered for applying "what if" tests, such as upgrading one item and reducing the specification for another. "To get a full view and come up with a number of options would save a lot of time," he said.

Mr Grime liked the video "walk-through", which shows how a particular kitchen layout would work in practice. "It would be useful to use this to "walk" from the sink to the fridge, for example, to see what you bump into," he said.

At the Intelligent Business Systems stand, the Holiday Inn pair bombarded director Gareth Powell with questions about his company's food and beverage system. "When you've placed an order, what information will this tell you about stock loss or gain?" demanded Mr Grime. "Can you report bar by bar if you have several outlets?" asked Mr O'Malley. They went away impressed, and resolved to pursue this further.

Charles Mobbs, head of sales at Fretwell-Downing, and Paul Weare, retail systems manager at Sharp Electronics, explained their joint venture in smart-card technology. Some of Fretwell-Downing's catering clients are issuing smart cards with value credited on them, for cashless transactions. Applications include school and staff meals.

"You could give this to corporate customers with some value on it, and they could carry it around from one Holiday Inn to another," said Mr Grime.

They also liked the fast user interface of the 7800 Touch point-of-sale system demonstrated on the Alcatel Business Systems stand. "We're looking at installing touch-screen systems now," said Mr O'Malley.

Late-entrant exhibitor CPC Business Systems showed its Publican 2000 point-of-sale (PoS) and stock control system. Designed as a simple solution for free house pubs, the system offers two PoS terminals, a bill printer and software (to run on a PC) for about £3,000. This is claimed to be about half the price of systems designed for brewery managed houses and tenanted pubs.