Cafeteria Recording system for

About P& O Nedlloyd:

P&O Nedlloyd Container Line, one of the world's leading shipping lines and international logistics provider, is a 50:50 joint venture between Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and Royal Nedlloyd NV. P&O Nedlloyd is the world's fourth largest container shipping company by capacity operating with 157 vessels, totalling 407,000 teus. P&O Nedlloyd's global liner network offers 84 service routes and provides connections to 235 main ports. P&O Nedlloyd has a major offshore back office operations from Pune, India. This center works round the clock in order to cater to various time zones, which means that the cafeteria has to be operational 24hours x 7days x 365 days.

Situation:

    The cafeteria forms an important focus area for their HR and admin departments. Since the cafeteria is outsourced to a catering company, a smooth system for recording and tracking is essential.

    This proves to be a little tricky because in case of P&O Nedlloyd this means keeping track of mimimum 1000 employees at any point in time from different shifts. The need to segregate the consumption to the cost-centres, departments, shifts, company-paid etc further added to the chaos. The organization also needs to keep track of company visitors to the cafeteria.

    The catering contractor needs to assign staff to control and estimate the consumption of food items. He also needs to make sure that the pilferage is kept to the minimum and a correct count of consumption is kept. If he keeps conventional paper registers for employees to sign and collect the coupon, the post-processing becomes a time consuming activity, which cannot be checked and verified easily. The documentation for supporting his invoice becomes very voluminous and bulky. Since the cafeteria is very heavily loaded at peak hours, long queues form for collecting the coupons which is not desirable.

Solution:

    To counter this problem, Zestorm was awarded an assignment to design and implement a software solution for a transparent, scaleable, user-friendly cafeteria recording system for their 24x7x365 operations.

    Zestorm developed an easy-to use software solution called as Zestorm Cafeteria Pro, designed for mid and large sized organizations. This solution essentially manages the entire database of all employees in terms of items consumed, employee code, division/cost centre and shift; Data thus logged is then aggregated and summarized in the way required as reports.

Key benefits:

The benefits of this solution to all the parties involved were immense.

For the organization:

• Easy and precise verification of the invoice submitted by the catering contractor.
• Saving on time and cost of recording cafeteria data as compared to conventional methods.
• Segregation of the consumption amount according to departments/cost centers.
• Tracking company visitors according to department.
• Easy break up of amount to be paid by company and the employee according to business policies.
• Reduction of the queue at peak times as the data entry takes around 5-10 seconds

For the catering contractor:

• Invoice the organisation, sub-contractors and monthly account holders according to items consumed by them over the period of time desired normally monthly.
• Planing purchases according to the Daily item-wise consumption reports.
• Ensure no pilferage is happening due to any cafeteria users making ambiguous and unreadable entries in conventional recording system like register and coupons.

The Zestorm advantage:

Says Mr. Mutalik, Admin and Accounts manager at P& O Nelloyd ,

“Zestorm worked to understand our needs perfectly well and mapped it into their software solutions satisfactorily.”

Zestorm delivered the required results in an outstanding manner.

• The first prototype was delivered within a week
• Incorporated all changes desired during the development cycle
• Total solution with arrangement of Hardware, accessories etc.
• Online training and hand holding to the operator from the catering contractor
• Ensured error-free and smooth runs for the first three months
• Regular visits and back up for maintenance of the system.