Colchester Zoo Client Case Study
Detail
my name is caitlin jones and i am the i.t and systems administrator here at colchester zoo colchester zoo has been open for the last coming up to 60 years it's been under the current ownership for the last 40 so it has grown quite a lot over the years.
we are a 60 acre site of parklands and lakes with over 180 different species of animal 24 catering locations and five retail locations our managing director asked us to look into alternative epod solutions for our catering system to replace our legacy system that we had before we've grown a lot as a business and there were certain challenges that we faced with our previous system.
we didn't have integrated payments we didn't have fast access to sales data or any stock control systems in place so we knew that we needed something new we started off the process by doing a lot of research online looking at what other tourist attractions used and had on offer because it's a very unique environment so we wanted something that would be suitable for us we then contacted multiple companies had to look at their offerings to make sure that it was sort of suitable and could provide us with everything that we needed the search process was actually quite fast we looked at four companies um before deciding upon tabalis they offered the most complete solution and what they couldn't offer us at the time they've been flexible and been able to build build for us so that we can have a fully integrated system for all parts of our business tabanas were actually really good.
They were so enthusiastic about us as a business what we wanted to achieve and their solutions that they could offer us in terms of in the immediate future and further down the line with development it was a very sort of enthusiastic let's go for it kind of feel the key thing for us and the major decision factor was the reporting system the business analytics to allow us to make better business decisions the system itself is a whole leap forward to what we were used to with our legacy system so it provided us with everything that we needed off the shelf they were able to do integrated payments for us and along with customer integrations and existing integrations that would give us a real all-in-one solution we gave the go-ahead to go with tavalis we had a very short turnaround time of six months so we could get it in between our busiest seasons of summer and october half turn so the guys at tavalas were really great they helped us with all the setup all of our till layouts the process could not have been easier this system is so user-friendly and it's a vast improvement on what we were used to so our teams adapted to it really well and in terms of like speed of service it's really helped also by having everything all sort of integrated as one we have some teams that could be working on their own in some of the smaller sort of window kiosks we have larger teams like in our main restaurant.
where they've got kitchen staff front of house people prepping so communication and a system that makes it as easy as possible is really really important for our operation especially during our busy season the adaptability is excellent it all allows us to have information all on the same system it allows us to make changes across the whole site really easily rather than having to go around to each individual location and then sharing of information between departments is a massive benefit the reporting system is used by a variety of different teams here all the way from managing director down to our catering supervisor teams and they help us to make business decisions evaluate our menus see what products are selling well and what we have space to add onto our menus one of the things that i do with our business reporting system is look at the trends in sales look for any promotional opportunities that we can push out or flash sale opportunities and that we can run on time we have fully integrated payment options with our wireless system it allows us to seamlessly take payment for orders without the need to reinput any data and minimizes the issue of money not being taken sales being declined and so yeah it's a really great thing for us to have tobias offer 24 7 sport which is great for a business that's open seven days a week they're easily reachable and everything is sorted very quickly so our ticketing system is a standalone system and it has we've never really been able to get the functionality from it across the park with tabalis they built us a custom integration that allows us to offer member benefits for example when you come into a catering location make a purchase you can now scan your member card to get the benefit applied the fact that we are now able to offer a fully integrated system with our ticketing system with all our back office operations allows us to have a smoother day-to-day running of the business being able to see sort of how sales are going it's improved things massively for the real sense of achievement that tavares has successfully been implemented within the business it's helped massively with our teams and everyone's really seeing the benefit of it already the legacy system was very outdated it was very slow it wasn't integrated so to have what we have now with tabalis has moved us forward a great deal the future development with tavalis there's certainly scope and other avenues for us to look at things like mobile ordering kiosk ordering a pickup for some of our locations as the business grows there was quite a lot of pressure because catering is such a big part of our operation there was a lot of pressure to get it right make the right decisions now it's all been implemented it's a really proud moment to see it live and actually functioning and benefiting the business i am really proud of how things worked out with wireless from the very first decision all the way through to how it's been implemented and seeing the impact that it's had on the business is a really proud moment
