Beds and Bars select Tahola as their Business Analytics partner

Beds and Bars is a leading operator of tourist accommodation and entertainment venues in Europe. In total, the group has 21 backpacker hostels, 13 bars and several traditional British pubs in over 10 cities spanning 8 countries across Europe.

At the core of what they do are the four cornerstones of the experience they strive to deliver - one that is Safe, Secure, Fun and Value for money. When they get this right, the beds fill the bars and the bars fill the beds. Over the last two-decades they have taken the original model of 50-beds above a pub and evolved it into a concept that involves bespoke buildings with more than 500-beds and modern backpacker bars attached. Always searching for opportunities to introduce their brands to new markets, and establish businesses at home in the UK, and abroad.

Beds and Bars understand that as their business continues to grow, so too does their data and that data, has a key role to play in the success of the various brands across the organisation.

When we initially engaged with Beds and Bars over 12 months ago, they had already started to evaluate various Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions, but not without its own challenges and limitations. Beds and Bars had been using various tools including Excel for data reporting which was time consuming, cumbersome and prone to errors. They were looking for a solution that would speed up the analytical reporting process, ensuring it was more accurate, giving users greater flexibility, whilst also improving their response times to data requests.

We knew that we could meet Beds and Bars objectives, because of our consultative methodology and so we started the process in the same way we always do, by listening to what they wanted to achieve from the adoption of a Business Analytics solution. Following on from that initial process, we gained a greater understanding of their requirements and overall objectives, we then proceeded to set up a Proof of Concept, to demonstrate that we understood their objectives and could deliver a solution to meet them.

For the POC we used a small selection of their data sources; this included data from CMS Hospitality, their Hostel booking system and Zonal, their Epos solution. The objective of the POC was to demonstrate that we could not only meet, but exceed their objectives.

Due to the success of the POC, Tahola have been chosen by Beds and Bars to provide an analytics solution that includes data from a variety of disparate sources, that will be delivered as part of a phased implementation, providing the means of sending timely reports to key members of the management team. We will create a Qlik Sense application that will provide a single source for all KPIs across the business, with a set of defined measures and dimensions for Beds and Bars, that will enable them to create their own dashboards and reports, providing a true self-service business analytics solution.

The project will utilise the Qlik Sense data visualisation solution, one of the world’s leading self service BI software suites. A mix of two license types will be used together with a solution that will enable reports to be automatically distributed to users via email.

Tahola will also provide a framework for future data sources to be added, although those that will be included as part of Phase One include the following:

• CMS Hospitality
• Zonal ZBS UK Database
• Zonal ZBS EU Database
• S4 Labour Database
• Collins/Design My Night Database
• Google Analytics
• Excel Spreadsheets – Business Drivers and Budgets

The successful implementation will mean that there is a reduction on the reliance of time consuming spreadsheets across the business, together with an increase in the flexibility and ease of data analysis. Users will have the ability to apply multiple parameters to gain faster insights across the business, whilst also increasing the visual representation of data and the ability to drill down into lower levels of detailed data offering a much more intuitive, and user-friendly way to view trends across the business.

Mobin Rana, CFO at Beds and Bars commented

"We are delighted to be working with Tahola on this exciting and important Business Analytics project. We know exactly what we want to achieve and Tahola demonstrated what is feasible, through the Proof of Concept confirming one of our key worries – the ability to access and work with our data We were delighted with the outcome and are excited about the future of the project and the benefits it will bring to us as an organisation".

For further information please contact:

Leigh Baillie

Marketing & Communications Director

Tahola Ltd

Leigh.Baillie@Tahola.com

+44 (0) 7894 517828