case study

St. Paul's Area Development Enterprise Centre

The SPADE Enterprise Centre is a community owned enterprise centre which was opened in 1990 in the converted St. Paul's Church at North King Street in Dublin. The enterprise centre provides incubation space to business start-ups in a number of locations including on-site at St. Pauls.

Historically reservations for the shared meeting rooms were managed manually using a hardcopy diary via reception service. This manual system worked well in the main, however as the centre got busier, reception's time was becoming more valuable and administering meeting room reservations was taking more time.

The functional requirements were simple:

• (a) Publish the meeting room diary online to facilitate availability checking by the centres clients using a web browser, thereby freeing reception time taking enquiries, manually checking the hard-copy diary and confirming back.
• (b) Allow booking records to be kept electronically
• (c) Allow client bookings to be reassigned by reception if required, to cancel or modify a booking on behalf of a client.
• (d) Provide automatic booking confirmation and change notices to avoid confusion.
• (e) Prevent missing and double bookings.
• (f) Track room usage to monitor utilisation.

Finding the right solution

When SPADE staff began researching software solutions it became apparent that the majority of off-the-shelf room managenent software required IT skills for installation and in some cases additional hardware to operate, adding to the cost. Moreover the complexity of some solutions posed a significant learning curve with functionality far exceeding requirements. A Google search for 'Meeting Room Management Software' solutions led the SPADE centre to BookMeetingRoom.com.

As a hosted SaaS solution BookMeetingRoom.com was immediatey accessible over the Internet using a standard web browser. (No downloads required, no software to install, no hardware to purchase, no IT skills required and no upfront cost).

Taking advantage of the 30-day free trial the SPADE Enterprise Centre were up and working in under 5 minutes. After using the system for two weeks alongside their manual booking diary they elected to expose the application to their business clients and went fully self-service.

"The ease of use and simplicity of function that BookMeetingRoom provides is exactly what we need. This meeting room booking software is simply perfect for us and greatly apreciated by our clients. Our Governing board and Financial controller were even happier given that we could pay a low monthy usage fee, freeing the originally allocated capital for another project."
 Susan Richardson - Manager, SPADE Enterprise Centre.

case study

St Mary's Parish Centre,Burley West Yorkshire,

" I thought that you would like to know that we are going to use your room booking system on a regular basis and we have entered billing details.  We are a small organisation, St Mary's Parish Centre in Burley in Wharfedale in West Yorkshire, and your room booking system is the best that we have come across for our scale of operation.  All the others we have looked at are both over complex for our use and too expensive.  I think that you have got the features and cost about right for this scale of operation.

Essentially, we have one person manning the office each day, and entering room bookings is only a part of their work.  At the moment we use an Outlook Calendar to control the booking of three rooms, and as you can imagine, it is very prone to error.

I have spent most of my working life as a programmer, although I have never been involved in Web programming, and I act as the IT Support person at St. MAry's."

Best Regards, Chris Nelson.