Park and Fly made Easy with Airparks

Private parking firm increases operational efficiency and customer service

Amanda Burgess, Freelance Contributor

TO BECOME the UK’s most successful private parking firm you have to know something about keeping customers happy and costs down. Founded in 1991, Airparks Services Ltd, now an £8 million-turnover company with five locations across the UK and 200 employees, has experienced, and continues to experience, strong and rapid growth. This combination of market potential and success made it imperative that the company implement a business solution that allowed it to effectively manage current growth while providing the capacity to scale for and manage future growth. An accounting application and document management system from IT services group Touchstone offers that capacity while providing superior service and a strong return on investment.

Airparks offers secure and cost-effective airport parking facilities and transfer and collection services to around a million passengers a year. Thirteen years ago, Airparks operated one location at Birmingham International Airport and had a management team of fewer than five people. It was, therefore, relatively simple for the accounts department to provide financial information. However, as the business grew and took on additional sites at London-Luton, Cardiff, Nottingham and Manchester airports, the number of accounting issues and the volume of paper files and the flurry of e-mails and faxes grew as well.

Records management needed
Airparks needed a new solution that would consolidate their accounting system: one that would enable management to view reports on profit analysis, as well as help their accounting staff to simplify their daily, monthly and yearly tasks including bank reconciliation. They also wanted a system that would manage the growing volume of paper records for the estates and customer services department and ensure employees had quick and easy access to financial paperwork to expedite the authorisation, receipting and invoicing matching processes. Adding to these challenges was the move by the company to new larger premises and a goal to embrace technology and dispense with cumbersome filing systems and expensive office space devoted to filing cabinets.

Having completed a full search process Airparks decided that Touchstone and Microsoft Business Solutions’ Great Plains accounting system and EASY document management software best met their criteria for support, cost, and growth potential. Steve Hayes Financial Controller, co-ordinated the selection process.

“Having Touchstone as a partner was a big plus since they are a one-stop shop and were able to meet all our business requirements,” says Hayes. “They have one of the best project management track records and offered a ten-stage phased approach that was helpful and meaningful and meant that the project was well scoped.

“We chose the Great Plains accounting application because it works well with Microsoft desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, Word and Outlook. Microsoft products also give you reassurance and we knew that Great Plains would have longevity. EASY document management also seemed like a good fit. We looked at other document management products but the search functionality was less than adequate. They tended to be just scanning solutions with none of the workflow and knowledge management functionality that EASY offered.”

Working with Touchstone, Airparks began its transition. After successfully testing the system and gaining user acceptance, the full accounting and document management solution was commissioned and deployed.

The solution provided Airparks with the ability to consolidate the accounting for each of their six regions while still maintaining autonomy for each area. Not being able to do so had been a big limitation for Airparks in the past. Being able to manage consolidations from the centralised database has meant a much faster reporting timeframe for Airparks, and saving the company hours of redundant data entry each month. It has also provided them with the ability to analyse financial data; they can now spot financial discrepancies easily which has helped eliminate inefficiencies. With the advanced bank reconciliation available with the new system, Airparks have improved cash flow and can focus on delivering product to customers and growing the business.

Reporting time reduced
Monthly reporting time has been reduced by 30 per cent since implementation of Microsoft Great Plains. Hayes expects even further reductions in the future. Electronic invoice approval linked to the document management system has saved Airparks “thousands of pounds” in postage costs alone.

Under the previous system, Airparks obtained invoices, posted them to the manager and waited a day or two for them to be approved or queried and then posted back. At times, invoices were lost or forgotten and, ultimately, went unprocessed or financial irregularities were missed. This resulted in a loss of financial control and large postage costs. With the DMS solution, this isn’t required; invoices are managed electronically and the approval process is fast and reliable. The results include time-savings and increases in efficiency. Postage costs have been reduced by 10-15 per cent.

The documents management solution allows Airparks to track customer queries and accelerate customer service. If a customer makes a complaint, it provides the customer service operative with the visibility to easily answer customer questions about the status of the complaint. With accurate, real-time visibility of the paper trail including letters, e-mails, customer service reports, cost estimates and photographs, the customer complaint can be managed effectively. This has increased customer satisfaction and protects Airparks from false claims. The electronic management and retrieval of files and improved analysis capabilities of the solution combine to enable Airparks to swiftly isolate anomalies in the data.

“When looking at budget variances, we are able to spot trends, cost increases and potential problem areas. We can then go back to the source invoices for clarification,” explains Hayes. “The solution helps ensure that a variance on a particular operational cost is brought to a senior manager’s attention quickly and is acted upon.”

Finally, paper copies of files are no longer necessary. A large volume of office space has been freed up, increasing the area of productive office space for people and reducing the cost of storage for filing. Management now has fast and reliable access to agreements, contracts, and planning permission details for each Airparks location, enabling further efficiencies.
“Offsite storage for documents is relatively inexpensive,” says Hayes, “but if you want to see a document, you don’t want to have to phone up and get it the next day; you want to see it straightaway.”

Airparks estimate that the time saved by replacing manual processes with electronic ones is around £20,000 each year, and that is solely in labour costs. Those savings alone “easily offset the depreciation on the software."

Airparks. www.airparks.co.uk

Easy Software, Reflection House, The Anderson Centre, Olding Road, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 3TA. Tel: 01284 727870; fax: 01284 727871; www.easysoftware.net; e-mail: info@easysoftware.net

IM@T Online January 2005