Bloomsbury
Shake, Rattle and Roll…Bloomsbury Bowling is one of the UK’s leading venues for US style ten-pin bowling. Designed around a traditional 1950’s American theme its alleys boast authentic features such as a cocktail bar made from forty year old reclaimed bowling alleys imported from Canada and a vintage ‘above the lane’ ball return. All of these create a unique atmosphere for its customers who can enjoy the venue’s full dining experience either in its public alleys or as part of a private party. The company operates four bowling alleys, two in London and another two in Bristol, plus it has a deli business selling fresh food and beverages.
The Challenges Bloomsbury faced – Flourishing business needed accurate business information to ensure continued growth.
Despite the recession, Bloomsbury Bowling is busier than ever, but in order to control and maintain its growth it needed far better access to its business information.
Financial Director at Bloomsbury, Mark Walton explains, “In our business, accurate business information is critical to our profitability. As we h plan to open more venues this requirement became even more important as we needed to centralize our operation and consolidate all our intelligence including, stock, sales performance, accounts information and staffing levels and manage it from a single location.”
Bloomsbury also took bookings for its alleys in advance, but this caused some accounting issues for the company as Walton explains, “Taking deposits at the time of booking was essential to ensure that we maximized the capacity of our alleys, however we needed a system that would allow us to make the booking, bank the deposit, but not account for the money until the full amount was paid. This was important to reduce accounting errors that could occur when bookings were not completed. Our previous system was not able to do this, which caused us a lot of accounting reconciliation headaches.”
Bloomsbury needed an EPoS system that could:
- Allow it to run its business remotely from any location
- Enable it to take telephone deposits and account for them correctly
- Incorporate a sophisticated stock control system
- Consolidate all its business intelligence including; stock, sales, staffing levels and pricing.
We are very pleased with the system and quite frankly without it we would not have able to expand our operation as efficiently as we have done.
The Solution
Bloomsbury undertook a thorough review of the market before finally deciding that the EPoS solution from pointOne met all their requirements, Walton comments on the selection process, “We were very impressed with pointOne from the outset, they are a young dynamic company that was prepared to listen to our requirements and customize their offering to meet the needs of our business. In short what they delivered was a one-stop shop – the complete EPoS system in a single package”.
Results – Business information – anytime, anywhere, anyplace
Many bowlers may search for the perfect game, but according to the management at Bloomsbury, they have selected the ‘perfect’ EPoS system to boost their revenue and keep a tight control of stock and staff.
Since installing the Epos system Bloomsbury have opened three new venues. The implementation of pointOne’s, Stock Control and Head Office modules has been essential to this operation as it has allowed them to centralise their hospitality management from a single location. The management team can update prices, review daily sales information and keep a tab on stock in real time. Walton comments on the impact the new system has had, We are very pleased with the system and quite frankly without it we would not have been able to expand our operation as efficiently as we have done. The head office module integrated with stock control means that we have ‘real-time’ access to business critical information for all our venues. In a tough economic climate, this level of control can be the difference between success or failure.”
Summary
What pointOne’s Head Office has provided Bloomsbury bowling:
- Real time information from all their sites from a single web browser
- Ability to manage EPoS product pricing and EPoS settings, even when in use onsite
- Remote employee management
- Ability to ‘message’ staff on each site
- Manage sales mix and financial data across single or multiple sites
- Manage stock control remotely such as ingredients, recipes, reports
- Use pointOne Alerts – to get real time emails/texts on key EPoS events.
EPoS tools used by Bloomsbury
What you sell, buy, and waste has a big impact on your bottom line. We operate, real time, ‘first in first out’ stock control for ‘actual’ GP tracking and reporting, multi supply unit and price for single ingredients, multi department management and cost/revenue allocation.
Slowey EPoS Head Office provides owner managers or corporate head offices with the ability to view, consolidate, and manage each of their sites remotely, either singularly, or as a group – and all in real time, with no more overnight polling.
Slowey Systems Kitchen Manager delivers clear concise instructions to kitchen staff via a simple easy to view wall mounted touch screen that displays multiple orders. The screens can be ceiling or wall mounted via space poles
