Who is ALH Group?
Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group has the leading portfolio of pubs across Australia. They offer a diverse hospitality experience including electronic gaming, sports bars, bistros, restaurants, cafes, retail liquor, accommodation, nightclubs and wagering. Their facilities are located in capital cities, and urban and regional centres across Australia.
There four main business activities are:
· Pub operations such as bar, food, accommodation, functions and entertainment
· Retail liquor sales incorporating large liquor barns, drive through outlets and walk-in bottle shops. Their brands include BWS and Dan Murphy’s
· Property development. They acquire, redevelop and refurbish venues to optimise our portfolio and offer state-of-the-art, comfortable, and interesting places to visit.
· Gambling operations. They are Australia’s leading pub operator of electronic gaming machines, wagering, sports betting outlets and KENO.
Background
ALH Group have been a client of Bizar Software for over 4 years. Until recently ALH had approximately 15 web providers across their 280 venue websites. In 2009 ALH have awarded a major tender to Bizar Software to become the sole provider for the ALH Group. This project makes Bizar responsible for the recreation and maintenance of all 280 venue sites over the coming years.
Major Challenges
1. Regulation of content Issues
This industry is heavily regulated in terms of acceptable content. For example, venues can not show pictures of pokie machines or advertise alcoholic drink specials. Ensuring that Bizar can be trusted to follow these guidelines was a vital part of Bizar being selected as the vendor.
Solution: using strict guidelines and agreeing on content collection methods has ensured that the content across all venues is consistent as well as legally compliant.
2. Project Management
This project requires almost 300 websites to be created. Content gathering for this project is a huge undertaking. Then of course each site has to be maintained. Taking maintenance requests from each venue has to be recorded and tracked.
Solution:A number of project tracking tools have been implemented to ensure this project is well managed. For example Bizar and ALH are making use of tools such as Basecamp and Zen Desk. The systems allow Bizar to log any works and allows ALH Group to track progress 24/7 without needing to contact Bizar.
The Bizar Difference
ALH Group is part of the publicly listed Woolworths Limited and directly employs over 14,000 staff. Many international and large national web development companies competed to win the business of this major project. Whilst it may seems logical for a company like ALH Group to use an equally large web developer, Bizar demonstrated that it was in fact one of its strengths to be small. It means we have a much larger invested interested in the outcome of the project and it is meant that ALH Group can expect much more of a personal touch that only a smaller organisation could provide.
Rick Cohen (head of IT) was quoted as saying “nobody in the world knows the ALH Groups website needs like Bizar does”. We feel there isn’t a better compliment.
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