Case Study for WOEC

Weymouth Outdoor Education Centre (WOEC) is the Dorset County Council centre for land and water based outdoor activities. WOEC’s primary purpose is to provide education for young people that complements the education received in schools and colleges. The outdoor programmes in which young people participate combine fun, learning, challenge and adventure.

The Problem

With ambitious targets for growth in the types of activities offered and an increasing number of people using the centre, it became apparent that the existing paper-based systems used for managing the operation were no longer sufficient. Staff and resources needed to be scheduled more efficiently and administration tasks streamlined to save time and minimise the risk of double-bookings and other resource errors. Said John Perham, WOEC Manager: "It became obvious that we needed to make the more mundane, time-consuming tasks much more efficient by adopting a more systemised approach."

WOEC needed a system that would help them cope with increasing administration and offer a more efficient and effective service to customers without triggering the need to recruit extra staff.

The Solution

WOEC implemented Reztec, a comprehensive training management solution provided by iDynamics. Reztec is designed to reflect the reality of managing complex training centres and is particularly suited to the outdoor education sector. John Perham bought the system during his previous role at South Cerney Outdoor Education Centre in Gloucestershire, so he knew it was right for the job.

Reztec enabled WOEC to bring all their manual processes together in one central system where managers and administrators can see all information about customers, courses, staff and resources at the touch of a button.

Using Reztec’s virtual whiteboard, WOEC staff maintain a schedule for both their day-time and evening events which is always up-to-date. Reztec enables them to view resource availability, highlighting where there are gaps and/or conflicts in the schedule, and makes it easy to group resources, plan events, allocate staff and equipment as well as communicate this information to others. The system records staff time, including holiday bookings and sickness absence, and WOEC staff make extensive use of the mail merge facilities to despatch marketing letters, order confirmations, joining instructions, etc.

Having recently upgraded to V33 of Reztec, WOEC now benefits from using Reztec’s group bookings facility. The attendees of each event can be divided into groups, and even subgroups, and each group allocated to specific activities using simple ‘drag & drop’ functionality.

WOEC manages all commercial aspects of their centre through Reztec, including sales orders and invoicing, and can generate management reports to monitor their sales and profitability without first having to obtain the figures from County Hall.

The Benefits

"Ensuring that the key information was being recorded in a consistent manner helped us to trust the system and be more willing to share information in a central repository rather than keeping it in our heads", continued John Perham. "It’s extremely advantageous to have all the functions necessary to our business running from one package. Reztec has provided us with a tool that has allowed me to manage the centre without being bogged down by administration as I used to be."

He concluded: "As a non-profit-making organisation, WOEC receives a grant each year from Dorset County Council. Over the last three years, the Council has been able to reduce this grant by more than 60% due to cost savings and a significant increase in bookings. Without Reztec, it would have been difficult to reduce our costs to such a degree and we would certainly have needed to employ additional administration staff to cope with processing the additional bookings."

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