Early market engagement for Food Retail, Delivered Hospitality and Events Management systems

Newcastle University are reviewing their Food Retail, Delivered Hospitality and Events Management systems.

The University has approximately 6,000 staff and 24,000 students.

The Hospitality & Commercial Services turnover, pre-Covid, was in the region of £5.2m and provided the following services:

1. a catered halls of residence supporting approximately 800 first year students.
2. 19 retail outlets (cafes and restaurants) currently with 31 tills, including loyalty and promotion schemes to encourage customer retention and growth.
3. conference bookings, managing venues and on-site accommodation.
4. event catering looking after both internal meetings / events and external conference customers, delivered across Campus from a central production site.

A number of different systems are currently used to manage these, some interfaced but also with some manual processes to transfer information. Ideally one system would be able to manage all services, or we’d be looking to reduce the number of systems and the manual processes.

The University’s SAP system will / is expected to be used for processing invoices and paying suppliers, and overall financial reporting.

Also:

On the retail side, there is a need to develop pre-paid catering packages for students not in catered halls of residences to use in the retail outlets, improve management accounting reporting and management of performance.

On the event catering and conference side, there is a need to improve the ability for customers to book and manage their events, to communicate more effectively with customers and to improve back office efficiency.

In preparation for a tender exercise, the University is conducting early market engagement to better understand possible solutions and estimated costs. To this end we are seeking discussions with companies who could potentially supply some or all of our requirements. Please register your interest on the Unversity’s e-tender system – ProContract,

procontract.due-north.com/Login ↗

including information about the services your system covers, an overview of the functionality, and what differentiates your system and company from others in the market.