Hospitality Ordering
The hospitality provider for a large government department needed
a system to collect refreshments orders from a Microsoft BizTalk
Server system and convert this information to a format suitable for
the kitchens, the butlers and the company's finance system.
The first stage of the solution was to create an Excel workbook
template available from within BizTalk which allowed the users to
enter their personal and department information, and where, when and
what refreshments they wanted. Much of the data was selected via
Data Validation lookups.
Once completed, the form was automatically emailed to the
hospitality co-ordinator, who ran a program to extract the workbook
from the email, and to add the data to a chefs' spreadsheet, so they
knew what was required and when, and to a butlers' spreadsheet, so
they knew what to deliver and where.
The system was also used to create invoices which were sent to
each department at month end, detailing what was ordered, when and
by whom.
The overall result was a system which streamlined and automated
data flows that were previously done manually, copying data from one
workbook to another, resulting in a significant reduction in the
time to process orders.