A Phoenix client since 2005, Welcome Break recently signed a new three-year maintenance contract covering its nationwide network of service stations. “We are the UK’s leading motorway service station company,” says David Willock, Director of IT, Welcome Break. Of the three major players in this sector, Welcome Break is the UK’s second largest, with 27 service stations.
With a Site Director leading each multimillion-pound location, and business units able to generate several million pounds a year in sales, this is food service and retail on a major scale; the leading brands that total some 265 units include Starbucks, KFC, Burger King and Eat In catering units, plus Waitrose and WHSmith retail units, Days Inn hotels and Shell and BP fuel forecourts.
Willock says, “All sites use Welcome Break systems and processes. All come under my remit as Director of IT – and are supported by Phoenix. We work with many suppliers and a limited number are strategic - Phoenix being one of those.” Working with Phoenix helps maximise Welcome Break’s capacity to trade, across all sites at all times.
Ensuring essential IT services
“IT service provision is essential to running our day-to-day business,” Willock continues. “IT underpins many of our processes, most notably from a customer perspective: serving people quickly and accurately 24x7. The EPOS system is a key part of that customer interaction, so has to be as reliable as possible.” IT is also critical in managing suppliers, for stock and purchasing, to handle payroll for several thousand mostly weekly paid employees. Phoenix provides break/fix maintenance to all sites, including head office in Newport Pagnell, covering desktops and servers. This involves handling 140-150 issues monthly, with engineers fixing and replacing hardware including EPOS tills to SLAs. “From a service standpoint, there are at least 140 opportunities each month for things to go wrong,” Willock says. “And this is an emotive area, especially when you’re dealing with tills going down at peak times. So it’s important the service from Phoenix is good; this is a very significant service for Welcome Break, and it works well. It’s a strong relationship.” Phoenix meets with his Support Manager monthly to review statistics on service and performance.
The second area is network monitoring, maintenance and operations. This covers the wide area network between head office and sites; connections that are vitally important, Willock says, “Because we run many key applications from the centre, from email to payroll.” Phoenix also provides an Internet Gateway across the WAN, enabling seamless access from all sites, plus network services at head office, monitoring and managing routers and activity. “On the network side, service delivery is also good, again based on a close working relationship,” Willock says. “We receive very few issues from our sites about how the network is performing.” Welcome Break’s Technical Manager similarly receives monthly reports and holds regular reviews with Phoenix.
The third area supported by Phoenix is ‘standard builds’, with Phoenix site engineers having the ability to instantly restore the latest stored image to a till or PC encountering problems, enabling fast and efficient rebuilds. This, says Willock, speeds up the process of testing, trialling and rolling-out updated tills to multiple outlets. “It’s quite a technical process and it works very well.”
The fourth area covered is Project Installations: “We recently opened four Waitrose units, which involved implementing new IT systems and networking” Willock says. “Phoenix is a key supplier for installs, notably EPOS tills and PCs, and again we receive a good service.”
Driving revenue
Willock adds, “There are some areas in IT where it makes sense to outsource to an expert provider, like Phoenix, that offers specialised services and has the economies of scale to deliver better, more efficiently and cost-effectively than we could in-house. Of course, Welcome Break maintains overall management responsibility. But fixing 140 hardware problems across all sites every month? We couldn’t do that, not in an efficient and cost-effective way.” Despite the recession, Welcome Break is faring very well. “A key reason behind our revenue growth has been a focus on ensuring customers get great value for money, and the key IT activities that help support that - including customer self service systems and free Wi-Fi. IT systems and processes also play an important part in the success of our newest brands, Waitrose and Starbucks. We are very proud of the work we’ve been doing to support the business in these tough times. It’s really satisfying to see how the combination of great offerings and strong business processes can impact revenue.”
