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Introduction
Business Information
Revenue Trend Monitoring
Room Pricing Tool
Room & Course Reservations
Client Services Extranet
Guest History Data Warehouse
Room & Course Reservations
A single point solution that replaced an out of control spread sheet system and saved thousands of man-hours.

Reservations for BMW
Having to contend with an out of control spread sheet application that was hampering the smooth running of an important contract, The Client was finding it increasingly difficult to make reservations and create management information reports for their training centre.

Powerful and flexible
KB Logic developed a robust and scaleable database solution that replaced the old system which was taking up to 25 minutes to load, 45 minutes to save, needed a lot of manual intervention and made it difficult or impossible to flex the booking model.

Fast and dependable
With the ability to migrate recent historic data and with familiar Excel usability, the new system is fast, reliable and offers significantly extended functionality that enables The Client to offer a better service with greatly enhanced customer relations.

Improved efficiency
The Client has saved many thousands of man-hours per year and now has an elegant and practical system that greatly improves customer confidence and gives them a single and consistent point for managing reservations and creating management information reports.

"This is so much better than our old system which failed all the time. It’s very much quicker and we can find information by surname, room number and so on. KB Logic was chosen by our head of IT because they came up with the best solution. They were very helpful and we enjoyed working with them.”
- Louisa McNulty - Reservations Supervisor. Verve Venues.


Details:

Reservations for BMW
Designed to reserve course space and accommodation for technicians attending Wokefield Park; a training centre run exclusively for BMW by Verve Venues, this application replaced a spreadsheet solution that had got out of control and was hampering the smooth running of an important contract.

The Problem
An IT contractor had created a series of MS-Excel spreadsheets where information was broken amongst a number of spreadsheets depending upon month, and which required the user to manually configure a new spreadsheet for each month.

This soon become so large it took up to 25 minutes to load and 45 minutes to save. It performed very slowly, needed a lot of manual intervention, and sometimes lost a whole day’s work. Also, the spreadsheet model had limited extensibility and was almost impossible to alter by an end-user.

Having such widely spread and slow loading data made it complicated and time-consuming to report on aggregated data, and it was difficult or impossible to flex the booking model because of the effect on data stored in historic spreadsheets.

The Requirement
KB Logic was commissioned to analyse the existing spreadsheet solution, to define the system’s functionality and behaviour, and to provide a replacement solution based on more robust and scaleable database technology.

The solution needed to permit migration of recent historic data from existing spreadsheets into the new database and, because users liked Excel’s ability to record new bookings very quickly, the new booking model had to mirror the existing system’s user-interface input style. Moreover, it was necessary to build-in some additional functionality that had arisen since the spreadsheets were first deployed, such as providing a mechanism for emailing confirmations to attendees.

The Solution
Given the time required to develop a new solution, we analysed the system and carried out several quick fixes to improve the efficiency of the current code in the spreadsheets - an instant improvement enabling them to load and save in less than a minute whilst the new solution was in development.

We implemented a new database solution developed around the Microsoft MSDE database engine, using .NET framework, which was designed to present a familiar Outlook-styled user interface with Excel - style input that was very quick and simple to use.

The Benefits
This radically altered the efficiency of the Client’s process, saving them hundreds of man-hours per year that would otherwise have been lost trying to feed and maintain the monster spreadsheets. Moreover, the Client now has a single, consistent point for managing reservations and can run reports that consolidate and aggregate data.
 
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