The Brookwood Partnership provides contract catering services to schools and its ‘Eating for Life’ programme has been raising children’s dietary awareness since 1996. Brookwood has been recognised by The Sunday Times “100 Best Companies to Work For” in each of the last 3 years.
3 years ago, Brookwood decided to replace its existing site management system with RAPID and, during this period, Brookwood has grown from 80 catering sites to over 100. It is therefore a good time to reflect on the success of the RAPID implementation.
Some comments from the Brookwood head office are:-
- “accounts clerks can manage twice as many sites compared to a manual system”
- “we are in control of liabilities on account cards, other forms of cashless payments and cash at all sites ”
- “exports to accounts systems make life so much easier”
- “we can design our own forms to collect any data that we need from sites”
- “being able to design a new appraisal form every time means I can focus on key issues and I love being able to report on training requirements so simply”
- “it is rock solid and the system has not failed since its implementation”
Site managers rate RAPID as 9.28 out of 10 for ease of use and some of their comments are:-
- “it is very easy to use and makes bookwork a breeze”
- “it’s all there”
- “it works really well”
- “entering invoices is really straightforward and the weekly checklist makes sure I do everything before I go home on Friday”
At each site, entering invoices is simple, cash & account card reconciliation is controlled, consumption is analysed weekly, health & safety checklists monitored and staff appraisals completed twice a year. Staff in head office monitor cash, consumption, financial performance and instigate remedial action where necessary. Policies are published in the document library, actions monitored and forms designed for data collection from sites. RAPID is a hosted, cloud-based, service that simply requires a browser to access, which makes the implementation fast and effective.