Reputable international provider of hospitality software, NFS Hospitality Corporation, was recently appointed by cellular phone giant Vodacom (Pty) Ltd to roll out its web-based booking solution called Rendezvous. Rendezvous was introduced to Vodacom as an upgrade on an earlier system called CABS which was utilized two years ago.
Approximately 70 meeting rooms nationwide meant that the organization was continually plagued with double bookings of facilities by employees. This was accompanied by costly catering wastages as well as significant time wastage in terms of the senior management resource.
"The primary area of rollout was at Vodacom's offices in Midrand called the Midrand Campus," says Jaydev Chiba, Vodacom South Africa's Managing Executive, IT Group. "This site, which is comparable to a University campus, houses Vodaworld which is only one of the various buildings that makes up the entire Midrand campus. It spans an extensive area and has a multitude of meeting rooms ranging in size, depending on the user's requirements.
"We needed a system that would enable anyone within the organization to book a Vodacom boardroom anywhere in the country by simply clicking a button to ascertain availability. Whilst the rest of the country can book a boardroom that is displayed on the Midrand campus, not all boardrooms outside of the Midrand campus are yet listed on the system. This will however change as soon as all sites are fully integrated to Outlook which comes standard with the latest upgrade version of the system," says Chiba.
"In addition, if the person making the booking required additional facilities such as refreshments and audio visual equipment, all that they needed to do, from their desk, was simply click another button. Essentially we were looking for a nifty, user friendly system that was a browser based application," comments Chiba. "And we found it in N.F.S.'s Rendezvous."
With the booking process having been streamlined, not only is information more accessible to staff, clients and user groups, but it can now be accessed without the previous administrative overhead.
"Having fundamentally changed the entire booking process at Vodacom, an even bigger task was to change the mindset amongst staff," says Chiba. "It was important that we communicated the fact that the product's efficacy, simply allowed people to focus on other important areas of the business and be utilized accordingly."
"Consolidated management reports allowed us to track room usage and monitor trends. This saw a reduction in facility abuse and paved the way to synchronizing and optimizing the use of most of the Vodacom meeting rooms," comments Chiba. "We have experienced both financial savings as well as increased productivity in this area since commencing with the programme."
Rendezvous is not only a comprehensive management solution that can be used by large corporations, conference venues and exhibition centres to plan meeting room usage, it can also be used to interface with leading room layout solutions as well. It incorporates key industry standard technology components including microsoft.net; SQL database; Crystal/XML reports and ASP.
