South Lakeland Parks

Formerly South Lakeland Caravans, the business was bought  by private equity group Legal and General Ventures in 2006. Following the acquisition, SLP conducted a review of current software and systems. They found that six separate systems were used to manage the various aspects of the business, none of which were linked. This led to difficulties in getting feedback on overall company performance, and delays in reacting to problems. SLP found the solution to be ParkVision, powered by Microsoft Dynamics NAV technology.

South Lakeland Parks (SLP) is the Lake District’s largest holiday parks operator, with nine locations across the North West. SLP specialises in developing and operating parks with caravans and timber lodges. The sites are home to almost 1800 caravans and lodges, over 80% of which are privately owned holiday homes whilst others are available as holiday lets.

Major challenge
The major challenge facing SLP was trying to generate accurate information in an efficient manner from the numerous systems in use. This is explained by Nigel Wimpenny, Chief Executive at SLP: “All of the company’s information was held in a variety of databases and systems. This made it difficult to get a quick overview of the business. For an organisation like ours that rents out holiday accommodation we need to maximise occupancy and this requires both historical and forward data to enable us to target our sales and marketing activities.”

SLP chose ParkVision not only because it offers sector-leading functionality in terms of park management tasks such as sales, marketing, and accounting, but also because of its seamless integration with TargIT, a management reporting application. TargIT allows holiday parks to analyse trends in operational data fed directly from ParkVision, and view progress against key performance indicators (KPIs) with up-to-date ParkVision data. This allows management to make quick reactions to any alarming trends and patterns in the business environment.

ParkVision by Qurius
The implementation of ParkVision and TargIT was only the tip of the iceberg for what Qurius could do for South Lakeland Parks. One aspect of operating several holiday parks is that collaboration and information diffusion between each site is slow and difficult. Qurius’ solution to this was to implement a Microsoft SharePoint portal.

SharePoint is a tool based around a web-based file repository, allowing users to store and share files. Its main benefit is the automation of business processes. Furthermore, SharePoint is fully integrated with ParkVision via an intuitive web-based interface. Designed to be user-friendly, the interface needs minimal training to operate, meaning that a wider range of employees have access to information. For example, a maintenance engineer can log into the SharePoint portal, giving them a task list of repairs which need to be made around the holiday park, which can then be marked on SharePoint as completed.

Another area of concern for SLP was the process of sending invoices to customers. When the new owners reviewed the existing system, they found that staff had to manually search the various company databases in order to print invoices for customers. This was not only time-consuming, but costly, as most customers would need multiple invoices sending, for various costs such as pitch fees, gas/electricity costs, and repair fees. Qurius suggested the implementation of Zetadocs for NAV, an application with ParkVision integration, allowing batches of invoices to be e-mailed to customers if their e-mail addresses are in the database, saving many hours of staff time and also reducing postage costs.

“The introduction of ParkVision has been a huge benefit to SLP” says Nigel Wimpenny. Having been hampered by the number of individual systems, staff and management now have instant access to all the required information in real-time.”

The solution has consolidated three databases, which can now be accessed across all sites and head office. There are also functions allowing for detailed accounting and sales procedures. Nigel is delighted with the project: “It has been a huge success. It is an all encompassing solution that all the staff have accepted and use because there is something in there that will help everyone. Tight timescales, along with the lack of an in-house IT team, made this a massive job, but with staff buy-in and the integral part that Qurius played it just shows what can be achieved.”