Originally established in the 1960's, Bourne Leisure has now grown to become one of Britain's leading leisure companies, employing approximately 12,000 staff and producing an annual turnover of £750m.

The group owns and manages 55 holiday parks, hotels and resorts across the country and provides caravan holiday-home ownership through its Owners Exclusive programme. Three years ago Bourne Leisure expanded its portfolio with the acquisition of Rank Holidays, and now incorporates the well known brands Haven, British Holidays, Haven Europe, Warner and Butlins.

The company provides holiday home ownership for 22,500 families and holidays for over four million people every year. With headquarters in Hemel Hempstead and offices at a further 60 locations throughout the UK and France, Bourne Leisure needed a tool which could consolidate and report on financial, management and sales information from all the individual brands at each location.

Problems with information overload

'With the acquisition of Rank Holidays the company also acquired a mass of new data which needed to be brought together and reported on,' comments Mark Humble, chief systems accountant at Bourne Leisure. 'The problem was trying to identify and recommend a standard tool to deploy across the group. At the time, each individual brand had its own process for reporting and we needed to create a more consistent approach.'

In addition, the old system of emailed Excel and HTML reports required a lot of maintenance, took up large amounts of bandwidth and had to be managed by outside contractors rather that in-house staff. Bourne Leisure required a new system which would be easy to manage and could utilise the company?s intranet to reduce bandwidth requirements.

Business intelligence improves the view

After looking at solutions from a range of companies, including Business Objects, Cognos and Actuate, Bourne Leisure selected Information Builders? business intelligence solution, WebFOCUS, based on its competitive pricing, high level of functionality and its simplicity to use.

Information Builders' WebFOCUS was implemented at Bourne Leisure to access data from the company's disparate financial, sales, and reservation databases running on Microsoft SQL servers. With WebFOCUS 200 management staff at 60 locations now have access to real time business information including sales ledger, stock control, sales margin and debtors reports via the company intranet.

'We chose WebFOCUS because we needed a tool that would be flexible and easy to maintain,' said Mark Humble. 'Since implementing the system we have been able to cut the cost of contractors by running and managing the reporting in-house. Additionally, managers are no longer swamped with information they don't need or want as WebFOCUS enables them to drill down to the particular information that is relevant to them.'

The new system has also minimised report production times and, by enabling access to the reports via the company's intranet, has decreased the previously high bandwidth requirements for reporting. With WebFOCUS, management staff now have easy access to real-time business information, helping them to review activity and productivity across the whole company and make informed business decisions.

Following the successful implementation of WebFOCUS for financial and management reporting, Bourne Leisure is now looking to extend its use to the company's HR function, using WebFOCUS to manage reports on staff training needs and development throughout the company.

'We have been very pleased with the performance of WebFOCUS and the benefits we have already experienced since implementing the system,' said Mark Humble. 'Moving forward we will be looking to implement Information Builders' report delivery engine ReportCaster to enable us to have a single point of control from which to manage the scheduling and distribution of reports.'