Demonstrating that their forward-thinking hospitality software solutions are cutting-edge, NFS Hospitality are hailing their latest project with The ifs School of Finance as a huge success.
The ifs School Of Finance is a registered charity incorporated by Royal Charter, providing financial education to financial services professionals and formal qualifications from GCSE level through to undergraduate degree level. They also provide a range of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) services through membership, and executive education through master classes, seminars and prestige lectures.
At their City-based facility there are over twenty meeting rooms used for a wide variety of purposes, from diary management to viewing resource availability, i.e.projectors. ifs realised it needed a system able to provide automated notifications to be sent out by their booking system in relation to meeting changes, and also one that would give them improved management information. These were two aspects the School felt were lacking when carried out by their existing system.
Paving the way in meeting room management and event management software, NFS deployed their innovative Rendezvous package to answer the School’s needs. The NFS team set up the system to provide easy-to-use diary views of all bookings as well as activity taking place within the facility. Ideal for a major educational event where some types of external booking are not possible on the day required, the daily, weekly and monthly views of availability and bookings by booking status are now invaluable to the events team.
Peter Carter, Marketing Manager at NFS said, “Rendezvous will also provide good management information for The ifs School Of Finance because maximising room and space utilisation in a very high cost part of London is a key success factor for the School.“
“The extensive Rendezvous reporting on room usage, analysis of business by event/booking type and source of business will also provide the management team much better information to target the most appropriate external business as well as to achieve a better balance between internal and external use of the facility,” Peter continues.
Key features like set-up and breakdown time management, cancellation tracking and multi-room handling will help the booking team optimise the use of space and achieve better revenue and yields.
Increasingly, Business Schools and Management Centres are looking to achieve the same overall benefits by implementing more up-to-date tools to manage the facility; tools which lower costs, offer better-quality external revenue, and allow for improved client services and superior management information. Rendezvous delivers on all of these key performance measures.
Peter added, “One of the most important factors of the School was the need to give the internal group of users of the facilities the ability to view room availability, as they make booking requests on a 24/7 basis, no matter where they are. The web-based Rendezvous Self Service Interface allows users to view, book and manage individual and group meetings, which has proven to be the ideal solution for the School.”
Paul Hacking, Rendezvous Trainer, said, “Self-service will radically change the access of staff to be able to make better decisions on meeting needs and course planning for thefuture, without the delays in searching for a suitable space and not being able to have instant confirmation of room and other resource availability.“
The big benefit of Rendezvous going forward will be in the easy access to good quality and timely management information. Having access to a wide range of standard reports and being able to generate queries using the Rendezvous Query tool will offer significant benefits, improving the quality of key decisions on facilities needed as well as in developing new external business.