Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Partnership Working Pays Off in Getting U.K. Hospitality Trading Online
Overview
Country or Region: United Kingdom
Industry: Retail and Hospitality
Customer Profile
barbox provides the United Kingdom’s market-leading transactional Web sites for the hospitality and licensed trade industries, with orders valued at around £320 million (U.S.$627 million) a year.
Business Situation
With online transactions forecast to rise by up to 75 per cent, barbox needs to ensure its hosted environment provides a safe, secure, and user-friendly ordering experience, with 99.99 per cent availability.
Solution
barbox has renewed its Microsoft® Services Premier Support agreement for the fourth year in succession to help ensure the stability, security, and resilience of its hosted environment.
Benefits
n Premier Support maintains growth.
n Account manager aids reliability.
n Customers have secure online ordering.
n IT team gains knowledge. / “Even a single hour of downtime would have serious implications for both our partner suppliers and subscriber base. It is comforting to know that we can call on support from Microsoft Services.”
Geoff Nicholson, Marketing Manager, barbox
The United Kingdom hospitality and licensed trade industries are enthusiastically embracing online ordering. As a result, the leading Web site operator for the trade, barbox, is netting sales of around £320 million (U.S.$627 million) a year since it was established in 2000. Its close business partnership with Microsoft, including the renewal of its Microsoft® Services Premier Support agreement for the fourth year running, helps ensure the highest standards of performance. This has helped to achieve 99.99 per cent reliability in the past four years, for an industry where even an hour’s downtime results in lost business and a damaged reputation. In 2008, barbox will use its proactive support from Microsoft to benchmark performance, improve the ordering experience, and make it even easier for customers to navigate the Web site.
Situation
barbox provides the United Kingdom’s market-leading transactional Web sites for the hospitality and licensed trade industries. It has more than 14,000 outlets registered, and annualised orders valued at around £320 million (U.S.$627 million). The company, founded in 2000 and employing just 27 people, operates the leading Web site for independent operators, barbox.com. The site brings together the best line-up of industry suppliers, expert sector information and advice, as well as business-building tools and downloads, in one place.
The barbox site, hosted since 2001 by Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner ioko365 using the Microsoft .NET Framework, also offers custom applications for managed retail groups and leased and tenanted pub companies. In recent years, licensed hospitality has woken to the operational benefits that Internet technologies can offer, and barbox has enjoyed sustained periods of high growth.
Recently, for example, United Kingdom leased pub operator Greene King rolled out an online ordering system and messaging tool for its lessees using the barbox environment. Geoff Nicholson, Marketing Manager, barbox, says: “From helping operators place orders at their convenience to driving incremental sales, the modular approach taken by barbox means our clients can access a high-specification solution quickly and without the high overheads one might expect.”
With average 18 per cent year-on-year growth and 15 different suppliers and trade link-ups, barbox is keen to avoid even a single hour’s downtime. “We’re a very fast evolving Web site,” says Phil Lawrence, Infrastructure Manager at barbox. “We make numerous changes to the site every week, wrapped up into a single release day wherever possible. The customers’ perspective is always maintained as they are involved in the numerous change requests that go on behind the scenes.”
Such has been the success of online ordering in the United Kingdom pub trade that Nicholson is forecasting growth of between 50 and 75 per cent in Web-based transactions in 2008. This means that the technology infrastructure must continue to be highly secure and reliable, building on the 99.99 per cent availability achieved over the past four years. Lawrence adds: “To put that extra load on the system, we have to make it ready to perform and future-proofed, otherwise we will have no peace of mind. Our reputation is at stake if anything was to go wrong.”
Solution
In building its large customer base and business partnerships with leading stakeholders in the United Kingdom hospitality industry, barbox chose Microsoft technologies. The hosted solution uses:
n Microsoft Commerce Server 2002—a tool for building e-commerce systems.
n Windows Server® 2003 operating system.
n Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 as the integration layer.
n Microsoft SQL Server® 2000 as the database.
In addition, for the past four years, barbox has annually renewed its Microsoft Services Premier Support agreement. This service, which currently provides the company with proactive and reactive hours, extends the partnership with Microsoft beyond the usual boundaries of a customer–vendor relationship. Lawrence says: “The service we’re getting from the Premier Support agreement is second to none. We are an online facilitator of orders on behalf of several suppliers in the United Kingdom. When they have requirements for implementations and fixes, we must respond quickly.”
Microsoft Services Technical Account Manager (TAM) Jonathan Wood is onsite with barbox once a month. He spends time with key people to discuss the latest projects for the Web development team. In 2007, he assigned all the proactive hours to the hosted environment. “It’s my job to make their working lives easier,” says Wood. “I also have responsibility for assisting barbox in adhering to best practice with respect to security, stability, and configuration, which barbox is keen to take onboard.”
For the past two years, barbox has been making good use of the Premier Support security health check offering through Microsoft Services delivery arm Premier Field Engineering. Wood says: “barbox has been quick to embrace and align its environment to recommended best practice, and this has resulted in the firm achieving a secure environment. Premier Support has worked in partnership with barbox to remediate issues and provide ongoing advice and support.
The focus in 2008 for the proactive hours will switch to performance, since a key metric for barbox is the customer ordering experience. Lawrence explains: “We are going to use Premier Support to ensure the configuration of our SQL Server 2000 database, Commerce Server 2002, and Windows Server 2003, is as efficient as possible. We want to maximise the hardware performance. We will also have some best practice days and scalability assessments by Microsoft.”
For barbox, Premier Support is not just a service channel, but a two-way relationship. “We can only derive benefits once we are aware of what is on offer,” says Lawrence. “This year we have been kept well informed about the offers available from Microsoft. Our TAM has regularly highlighted them, be it through whitepapers, Web casts, technical events, seminars, or reviews that we can undertake as part of the agreement”
Benefits
The phenomenal growth in popularity of trading online for the hospitality and licensed trade industry in the United Kingdom has led barbox to invest in a close business relationship with Microsoft Services. The company now has one of the industry’s most secure infrastructures, which means customers can order online safely and securely anytime. The Microsoft TAM is now focusing on performance to help ensure that the ordering experience continually improves to benefit both customers and suppliers.
Premier Support Helps Management Meet 75 Per Cent Growth Target
barbox needs a secure and resilient infrastructure to maintain its annual growth target of up to 75 per cent. “The time it takes to place an order is a key metric for us,” says Lawrence. “Only with Premier Support can we benchmark, from a user perspective, how streamlined our solution is, and the time we can save customers in navigating the site.”
To achieve this target in 2008, Microsoft Services, through the TAM, will help the barbox team with best practice days and scalability assessments. All with one end in mind—as Lawrence puts it, “to further improve the customer experience.”
TAM Contributes to Achieving 99.99 Per Cent Reliability
In a time-critical business such as the hospitality industry and licensed trade, which needs everything from beer and food to glassware and cleaning materials, time is money. Traditionally, landlords had to order over the phone through call centres during office hours. Now they can order online anytime, so downtime in the system would have a noticeable impact.
“We’re dealing in annual transaction revenues of hundreds of millions of pounds,” says Nicholson. “Even a single hour of downtime would have serious implications for both our partner suppliers and subscriber base. It is comforting to know that we can call for support from Microsoft Services.”
Customers and Suppliers Experience Secure and Safe Online Ordering
Peace of mind when accessing critical systems is vital to any industry, and the pub and hospitality trade is no different. For the past two years, barbox and Microsoft Services have undergone an extensive programme of checks to make sure customers can feel safe and secure when accessing the service. “We know our applications are coded in the right way,” says Lawrence, “and working with Microsoft ensures that we are implementing the right systems.”
Services Agreement Keeps Managers Up to Date with Technology
The business case for Premier Support is clear for barbox. “The benefits we can demonstrate to our directors make the justification for Microsoft Services Premier Support easier year on year,” says Lawrence, who highlights knowledge transfer as one of the extra benefits of Premier Support.
Wood says the objectives for security at barbox were achieved within the fixed number of proactive hours—a big bonus in terms of cost saving. “Other areas we will look at are workshops to get up to speed on the latest technology by drawing on in-depth knowledge available from Microsoft,” he says. “There are risk assessment programmes where a particular technology is checked for any possible vulnerability. All this makes for a good working relationship for which both sides can take credit.”
Microsoft Services
Microsoft Services helps customers and partners discover and implement high-value Microsoft solutions that generate rapid, meaningful, and measurable results. As the consulting, technical support, and customer service arm of the world’s leading software company, Microsoft Services enables the successful adoption, deployment, and use of Microsoft solutions and technologies for all customers, from the individual to the enterprise.
For more information about Microsoft Services, go to:
www.microsoft.com/microsoftservices