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Government-backed BIG gives billions of pounds of National Lottery funds to worthwhile causes across Great Britain, now helped by wide adoption of their browser-based booking software, Rendezvous, provided by NFS.
Officially established in 2006 by Parliament, The Big Lottery Fund (BIG) gives around £2 million of lottery funds every 24 hours to community groups and projects that improve health, education and the environment. These are funds raised by The National Lottery for good causes – around 13p for every lottery ticket sold.
BIG exists to ensure that most people across the UK are within a few miles of a lottery-funded project. It delivers funding mostly through programs tailored specifically to the needs of communities in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, as well as some that cover the whole of Great Britain.
To date, BIG has given over £2.8 billion to good causes and is currently working on 30 UK projects. With a corporate office in London, BIG also has offices in Birmingham, Nottingham, Cambridge, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Manchester, Guildford, Exeter, Leeds, Belfast, Glasgow, Powys and Cardiff.
Multi-Site Access Improves Booking Processes
In order to review the many thousands of requests and projects involving lottery money, BIG needs to conduct a very large number of meetings at all its office locations. It was because of this that in 2009 the organization installed the
Rendezvous scheduling software solution from NFS, initially at its head office and then rolling out to additional locations. The system was deployed primarily to provide more efficient processes for checking availability and booking of rooms around the country.
Rendezvous has now been in situ at BIG for over two years and has been extended to all the main UK offices. The system is accessed by all staff via the company intranet and all bookings are approved by a small team of supervisors who check that the right rooms are allocated to the right project teams.
The Self Service interface available for Rendezvous makes it easy for users to view available space and make booking requests on a 24/7 basis, with minimum training needed, which has been a key factor in product adoption and wide usage across the business.
Enterprise Wide Deployment Saves Time and Improves Business Decisions
Jill Thompson, Facilities Manager at BIG and an experienced user of
Rendezvous, comments:
"This is a very user-friendly solution which saves our admin teams many hours a day. This because it is able to efficiently manage bookings as well as all the confirmations and notifications needed to ensure meeting hosts and service providers are kept fully engaged in the process."
"As a business tool, we find that Rendezvous enables us to make better decisions on both meeting room space requirements and ancillaries, such as appropriate stock levels for AV equipment. Management reporting information, like utilization reports, is available in just moments, saving me personally a great deal of time when responding to senior managers’ questions about room usage across the company," explains Jill.
"In addition, having fast access to room
availability information, including for
multi-site meetings, makes it possible for our
Client Services team to plan meetings very
efficiently."
"For companies struggling with using Outlook to schedule meeting rooms and resources, the
Rendezvous platform offers excellent functionality; being browser-based,
Rendezvous delivers a solution that is fully integrated with Outlook," comments Luis De Souza, Managing Director of NFS.
He continues: "The powerful reporting
capability within our software helps
organizations make better business decisions
regarding space and equipment, and the
notifications and alerts feature ensures that
frequent changes in meeting schedules and
requirements can be well managed within a busy
office environment. This equates to more
efficient meeting bookings, time savings for
admin teams and the ability to deliver a great
service to the user community."
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