How Celtic Manor Resort successfully digitised its 5-star operations

About Celtic Manor Resort

Located in South Wales, the Celtic Manor Resort is part of the Celtic Collection hotel group, made up of nine luxury leisure and business facilities in the UK.

Housed in an imposing building that was once a Victorian mansion and a maternity hospital, the Celtic Manor Resort is a five-star tourist complex with 330 rooms, three golf courses and two adventure golf courses, a spa, five restaurants, 31 function rooms and the Forest Jump adventure circuit.

The resort opened its doors in 1999 and has hosted major events, such as the Wales Open golf tournament and the 2014 NATO Summit.

The Challenges

The large size of the resort

• The resort's various facilities occupy more than 800 acres.

• The list of assets to manage exceeds four thousand.

The high number of suppliers

• The resort relies on subcontracting as a way of boosting the local economy, which adds complexity to the maintenance operation, particularly on the preventive side.

• Contact with the large number of external partners was made through traditional methods, such as telephone and email, which made processes time-consuming and prone to failure, especially those related to invoicing.

Insufficient support software

• As well as being unintuitive, the software used only supported reactive maintenance and was incapable of centralising all assets.

• The existing system was also based on Excel sheets and paper asset lists, which was not an environmentally sustainable practice.

• The information was neither organised nor accessible to all those involved — it needed to be protected, digitised and made available to increase the efficiency of the operation.

Intelligence served up on a platter — to guests and staff alike.

The Celtic Manor Resort's main mission is to provide an excellent welcome for its guests, which is only possible with a well-tuned and aligned maintenance team. However, the operation was showing inefficiencies. Despite some initial setbacks due to personnel changes in both teams, Infraspeak was soon fully functional and making the work of the resort's managers and technicians easier.

As an intelligent maintenance management platform, Infraspeak has enabled Celtic Manor to fully digitise and centralise its asset list and supplier documentation, drastically reducing the use of paper. Because of the quick access to information — available on a computer, mobile phone or tablet — the communication tools provided by the platform have meant that technicians no longer have to go to the wrong place or don't have the information they need, as they now have all the instructions and documents in the app itself.

These productivity and efficiency gains, as well as the collection of asset data, are helping to reduce the hotel complex's carbon footprint. One example is the measurement of room temperatures, which allows the heating and cooling of rooms to be managed more efficiently, thus saving energy.

With Infraspeak, both top and middle management have gained control over maintenance activities. As Andy Kitson, Lead Electrician, pointed out, it's now easier to show your superiors how things are progressing and to know who's doing what. Planning jobs and managing human resources has also become simpler, through applications such as Planner and Calendar. The work of the maintenance team is now more visible, and the technicians feel recognised and valued.

Purchasing management and relations with service providers have also become more fluid, based on trust and transparency. Work is now collaborative, involving all stakeholders, with better communication and no risk of data loss. The result is more effective supplier management, leading to improvements in preventive maintenance and compliance. On this point, Infraspeak's ability to integrate directly with the British standard SFG20, which certifies the safety and quality of maintenance, and native applications such as Gatekeeper, presents a significant advantage.

By offering comprehensive and advanced capabilities such as the management of maintenance calls and their history, the tracking of time allocated and the possibility of inserting and consulting images, Infraspeak has made it possible to improve both preventive and reactive maintenance at the Celtic Manor Resort, which is reflected in the satisfaction of guests, who experience even more extraordinary stays.