Client Testimonial

Manchester City Council: Hospitality and tradingservices

Background
Manchester City Council is responsible for the largest economic region outside London, with over 2.5M people in the greater Manchester conurbation. The Hospitality and Trading Services (HATS) department provides services for markets, catering (including retail outlets and schools) and managing the Town hall and other venues.

Manchester Fayre is the catering trading arm of Manchester City Council and provides school meals for over 200 primary, secondary and special needs schools in Manchester. Manchester Fayre aims to provide a service that promotes healthy eating and lifestyles in schools by working in partnership with Head Teachers, Governors and parents.

Problem
Providing such a large number of school meals, to a high standard, on a daily basis requires strong management and processes. Critical to the provision of the service is the quality assurance programme that requires area managers to regularly check all aspects of the school catering operations at the point of delivery.

HATS had operated a manual system for a number of years. This required the area manager to fill out a paper form onsite and then return to the office and manually rekey the results into an Excel spreadsheet. As well as being time consuming, the process was also open to error when the data was transferred to the computer system. Further work also had to be carried out to consolidate different survey results and produce meaningful reports that departmental management could utilise.

The IT staff at HATS were committed to using technology to reduce the administration overhead of the process and invested in a number of HP iPAQs with a preentered spreadsheet for the area manager to complete on site. Although this helped in reducing some of the time spent on the process, the management of the data transfer and consolidation of the different survey results was still causing problems.

Solution
HATS were familiar with systems developed by APH from other such systems in local authorities and schools. Through this relationship they became aware that APH had successfully implemented a QA solution for another council in the North West of England.

After a thorough evaluation of the QAP solution HATS decided to implement it for use in their own school catering surveys. QAP is designed to run on the latest mobile technologies (HP iPAQ or XDA2 Bluetooth mobile phone). It has been designed specifically to facilitate local authorities’ school catering facilities inspections, and covers all types of school: nursery, primary, secondary and special needs.