Cirrus Inns are giving their data meaning through the adoption of TaholaCloud

We are delighted to share that we have recently implemented our game changing SaaS based business analytics solution TaholaCloud, across the 26 Cirrus Inns sites in the UK

Cirrus Inns operate an award-winning collection of 21 stylish countryside inns in the South of England and five London pubs, including the UK’s best pub/inn. They are all true destination pubs and inns offering classic British comfort with farm-fresh British cuisine. Most of the inns are rated 4* for accommodation and many have one or two AA rosettes; others have AA Dinner Awards or AA Breakfast Awards.

Cirrus Inns is also the investment vehicle behind The Epicurean Club (www.epicurean.club), a club helping its members to get more of their daily escapes and weekend breaks, through members’ rates, rewards, curated experiences, all centered around the Epicurean Collection, a collection of the most iconic pubs and inns in the UK, together with its brand partners (which include Moët Hennessy (and its brands), Hunter and Tesla).

Cirrus Inns have worked in partnership with Tahola on the development of the latest version of TaholaCloud for Hospitality. We did this because, as an organisation, we felt that it was imperative to ensure we had a solution that was truly fit for purpose for operators across the hospitality sector, a solution that has been "designed by operators, for operators", and chose Cirrus Inns as the ideal partner with whom to develop TaholaCloud given its balanced countryside and London estate and business complexity.

TaholaCloud is a SaaS based analytics solution that manages key business drivers, and provides insight and intelligence without the cost and complexity of traditional approaches to Business Analytics solutions. It enables multi-site operators like Cirrus Inns to make faster and more informed decisions in a streamlined and cost effective way. It has also been transformational in allowing the Epicurean Club to provide the best, most rewarding, benefits possible both to its members as well as enhancing the turnover and margin at site level.

Hospitality is a challenging market place and one where technology and agility are key to growing a business. This is why we are certain that TaholaCloud will play a fundamental role in the future growth plans of Cirrus Inns. This can be said with confidence, because in just over two months, we have implemented TaholaCloud across all of Cirrus Inns’ sites. It is already changing the way they operate and all decisions made across the business are now data driven ones.

TaholaCloud is currently being used by landlords and the management team at Cirrus Inns. The main objective for the implementation was to address the time it was historically taking to produce their Monday morning reports, by looking at previous weeks trade against historic data and across product categories.

Every site now has visibility of all other sites across the business, meaning that there is now complete transparency across all 26 sites, creating an increased level of competition between sites, driving performance.

Each site has the same dashboards and reporting functions and TaholaCloud now gives real meaning to their data, ensuring that the landlords can now truly understand what they are being presented with. The graphical and contextual nature has improved the effectiveness of the data, as opposed to just being shown numbers in isolation.

The initial roll-out was to senior management and operations managers and began in mid-September; a week later it was rolled out to every landlord and all sites were live by the end of September.

Because TaholaCloud is intuitive and user friendly it means that users can’t “damage” the solution, through lack of understanding. The solution is so intuitive that the users didn’t require any official training, but time was taken to explain the functionality and benefits in detail to the operations managers, who in turn explained to the landlords at each site before they started to use it in their daily routine.

With the current high levels of uncertainty within the Hospitality industry, timely accurate reporting can’t be a nice to have. You need to be able to bring multiple data sources into one place giving a complete and accurate view of how you’re performing against KPIs on a daily basis, but also be able to drill down into the granular detail to truly understand the ‘WHY’ behind the ‘WHAT’, because we know that it’s only then that you’ll be able to obtain the actionable insight to make better decisions, more quickly, resulting in increased business performance and efficiency.

TaholaCloud provides Cirrus Inns with the ability to do exactly that, by monitoring and controlling their business on any device in any location, they can track their KPIs and drill down to transaction level detail, ensuring the information required is available and up to date any time of day or night.

An accurate forecast to ensure any hospitality organisation runs smoothly is essential. If you don't know what you’re likely to sell, how can you possibly predict the staff and products you’ll need?

Formulating an accurate forecast enables users at Cirrus Inns to look at a variety of data sets, not just what happened the previous week.

By integrating TaholaCloud with a selection of data sources, we are able to maximise the insight and intelligence that can be uncovered to ensure users have access to the right data sets, providing more accurate and efficient reporting to be produced at the click of a button.

Landlords can then overlay their knowledge to forecasts, ensuring that they know what and who they need, where and when. This not only allows them to satisfy demand, but also helps to take advantage of new sales opportunities in an increasingly competitive market place.

TaholaCloud is currently integrated with Cirrus Inns’ EPOS solution, enabling them to really see what is happening on the ground. Every transaction is reflected in their sales data, including every void, up sell, profitable and unprofitable time slots and every discount that is applied.

TaholaCloud brings all of their sales data together so they can see how each site is performing. We will also be providing APIs to additional data sources as the project progresses, resulting in increased benefit and far greater insight into the business.

This integration process is seamless and has minimal impact on the business. This is because we have developed pre-built interfaces that link to many third-party data sources. We recognised the effectiveness of enhancing our own specialism, through integration early on, knowing that it would add further value for the users, saving time and minimising the need for investment in costly bespoke integration work.

This really is where the magic happens, by bringing data from multiple sources you can see stories in your data that you would never have known existed.

We are working with a variety of industry leading technology companies, data sources and digital functions to ensure greater clarity through collaboration to make your lives as operators easier, meaning you get actionable insight from all of your data sources. Any of which can be provided as additional modules as part of a phased implementation process, as and when required or budgets allow.

Our integration library is constantly evolving and currentlyconsists of many pre-built interfaces to a variety of EPOS, Labour Scheduling, Table booking, customer feedback, menu and stock management, CRM & call systems, accommodation, loyalty apps, weather data and many Social Media channels.

TaholaCloud is already changing the way Cirrus Inns operate and think about their data, enabling them to see and understand their data in a simplified way, meaning informed decisions can be made quickly and with ease.

"We are delighted to be working with Tahola and excited about what we can achieve through the adoption of TaholaCloud across our 26 sites. We have worked in partnership with the development of the latest version of TaholaCloud ensuring it is truly fit for purpose, for operators across the hospitality sector.

Our Landlords are in the early stages of adoption but already, we are seeing a reduction in the time spent creating reports and a greater appreciation of the data which provides them with knowledge and therefore facilitating opportunities within our business. The application provides transparency together with allowing management to create incentives which can be effortlessly measured.

I believe TaholaCloud will be a real game changer for us, enabling a far greater insight into our business than ever before, giving us simple and easy access to complex data, from a single software solution.

I believe that TaholaCloud will truly revolutionise the way we evaluate our business forever."

Polly Dyson - Finance Director, Cirrus Inns

“We are excited about what the future holds for our partnership with Cirrus Inns. TaholaCloud really is a revolutionary approach to SaaS based analytics for the Hospitality Industry. Designed and developed in collaboration with operators, it combines multiple data sources to deliver insight and ROI through intuitive and user friendly dashboards. Our experience within the industry allows us to extend our offering further, by providing value added services and complimentary capabilities to ensure that each implementation exceeds the businesses needs, whilst always allowing scope for future growth”

Jason Martin - Managing Director and Founder, Tahola

TaholaCloud is revolutionising the way our customers evaluate their business and is enabling them to discover trends in their data, that they never knew existed.

If you'd like to gain invaluable insights to inform and improve your daily decision making, then get in touch today to request a TaholaCloud demonstration and we'll show you how.

Leigh Baillie

Marketing & Communications Director

Tahola Ltd

Leigh.Baillie@Tahola.com