• Corporate Head Offices
CABS supports establishments providing a first-class client experience when guests attend for meetings and events and to ensure that the whole team involved in making them happen are up to date, fully informed and working together to maintain and enhance your reputation. CABS also takes the hassle out of booking and managing internal meeting rooms and hotdesking situations.
• Hospitality Sector
Establishments that typically host events that are chargeable can reply on CABS. In this environment, CABS supports you from initial enquiry, providing quotes, appointing the event manager, through taking deposits, finalising numbers and arrangements, an in-event additions or changes, to final invoicing and post-event profitability analysis. Of course, CABS offers a full suite of reports and on-screen views, so that you and the team always know what’s going on and can work seamlessly together as one keeping morale high and delighting your guests.
As you’d expect from a system this flexible, it’s also OK to be a mixture of both. CABS makes it just as simple and easy for corporate users to manage chargeable events for clients, as it does for commercial venues to look after the booking of their in-house facilities for colleagues to use too.
If you, like most of our clients, are used to and enjoy the benefits of private, in-house, on premise systems, then you’ll be pleased that we are still committed to supporting you in this. As with your other enterprise-level applications, you define the infrastructure standards, the pace of upgrades and the procedures and policies followed when deploying and maintaining CABS.
Hosting CABS in a private Cloud is a very close relative of the in-house deployment and several of our clients have successfully deployed CABS on their own private cloud platforms, often removing not only the physical equipment from their environments, but also outsourcing the maintenance of their servers to the hosting provider. If required, Business Careware is ready, willing, and able to provide outsourced application maintenance for CABS too.
Alternatively, you might wish to consider “renting” the whole service from us. We work with a leading UK ISO 27001 accredited, and UK Government G-Cloud approved hosting provider so that we can provide the highest levels of data security, from 3 data centres which use 100% renewable energy, and multi-10Gb network with 100% network uptime guarantee; all backed with 24/7 support. This means that you can focus on working with us to set up and implement CABS to suit your exact requirements.
Many, well-established professional service firms (lawyers, accountants etc.) have a “personal service” culture meaning that users typically phone or email some form of service desk, often reception, to ask for room bookings, catering and to inform them regarding visitors – which is fine and CABS works wonderfully in this setting.
We are also finding that there is a growing demand amongst a younger generation of booker to be able to do this directly on the system. The main advantage to them is that they feel as though they are in control and they know that there is no risk of anything getting “lost in translation” by going through an intermediary. They also appreciate the immediacy of the interaction – they log in (or use the highly intuitive CABS MS Outlook Add-in) and they can see the proof of their booking on the screen. There are also great advantages of this to the service desk – they find themselves liberated from the day-to-day deluge of routine requests and able to focus properly on other demands, which are typically unplanned and require instant and often protracted action.
The great news is that CABS is equally comfortable with both ways of working. In fact, it can be configured to support both at the same time and/or to allow some spaces to be booked on a self-service basis, without any administrator involvement, while others can only be requested with administrators reviewing and approving before the booking is confirmed as accepted. Of course, it is also OK to have some areas that are only accessible for administrators, and perhaps EAs or PAs, retaining tight and exclusive control. The choice is yours.
With functionality delivered and accessible via a web browser, installable and intuitive function point apps, touch-screen kiosks, and digital room signage, you have the freedom to use the most suitable device for your situation, meaning that you are able to mix and match everything from multi-screen desktops to ruggedised hand-held terminals and all points in between.
Due it the richness of the system’s powerful core functionality, you can run a very effective booking system with just the CABS System Manager and the CABS Room Bookings Manager modules – several of our clients do.
When your needs go beyond this you can add further modules to match your situation:
CABS Finance Manager looks after the pricing, costing, recharging and invoicing – including deposit handling - for you. If you add our Finance System Integration module, we can seamlessly feed data between CABS and your finance system of choice, making reconciliations and costly posting mistakes a thing of the past.
CABS Service Delivery Manager is there to ensure that, behind the scenes, everything works like clockwork and is stress-free. Supporting a paper-free environment, the CABS Service Delivery Manager provides real-time, up to the minute diary views of service requests, on-screen delivery scheduling with built-in multi-way communication and docket printing, as well as facilities to book taxis, handle delivery notifications and all that other “stuff” that can be such a pain to deal with.
CABS Front of House Manager is more than a visitor registration service. As you’d expect from CABS, there is a comprehensive and fully-integrated set of functionality and workflows. Visitors can be internal or external and can attend for events booked through CABS or for other reasons. The system looks after both expected and walk-in visitors, the printing and/or issuing of badges and handles multi-stage arrivals e.g. building lobby (or car park arrival) followed by arrival in the reception area, with automated host notification and guest identification assistance, before collection and departure updates. CABS Front of House Manager remembers visitor preferences from previous visits, including dietary requirements, and even helps you take care of cloakroom use and left luggage.
CABS Organisation & Colleague Manager handles all of your contacts, allowing you to organise them in ways that exactly match the many and various structures that you come across in your daily interactions. Used to support your own internal structure of departmental hierarchy as well as all your third-party contacts, the CABS Organisation & Colleague Manager supports integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory (or other system of authority for user access and permissions) and the bulk uploading of contact information to support sales and marketing activities. CABS even knows how to handle agents, be they the on-going primary contact for an event or merely an introducer, handing over the responsibility to a client once and event is booked.
CABS Bedroom Manager is designed to offer all the functionality you’d expect from a hotel reservation system. With both ‘soft blocking’ (reserving bedrooms by type – e.g., superior double) or ‘hard blocking’ (allocating specific guests to specific bedrooms), CABS Bedroom Manager also provides check-in and check-out functionality, real-time bedroom status visibility (e.g., ready of occupancy) on the daily/weekly diary, and bedroom related charges e.g., room service meals and newspapers.
CABS Workspace Manager makes hotdesking, office sharing, flexible working and multi-site working easy for staff members, especially using the super-intuitive CABS Workspace Manager Function Point App, and administrators alike, with visual floorplans, effortless recurring bookings, subtle policy reinforcement and auto-emails for confirmations, reminders etc.
CABS Shared Space Manager does what it says on the tin! It helps make the operation and use of shared spaces a breeze for all concerned. Not only does CABS Shared Space Manager make it simple and convenient to book, use and report on communal areas, when spaces are reserved for sole-use through the CABS Room Booking Manager, they are automatically unavailable for shared use. Your shared spaces can be configured as gyms, pop-in training facilities, café and restaurant service sessions (e.g., breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea), with the option of handling table bookings too.
CABS Catering Manager works with the CABS Shared Space Manager in a dining or restaurant setting and helps you systemise and add structure to the chore of menu development and meal delivery. Starting with a dynamic library of menu items, CABS Catering Manager assists you in the creation of specific dining menus, pulling through item costs and providing visibility of profitability (assuming that you charge for or recharge the meals). This means that you can build menus to achieve target price/cost where necessary. Of course, once created and scheduled, the menus are easily converted into beautifully printed menu cards or digitally displayed menus, as well as being expanded into supplier orders and/or item prep schedules.
CABS Special Dietary Requirements Manager works across all of the CABS modules keeping track of staff and visitor preferences and (mild and severe) allergies, and cross-references these with the characteristics of relevant food and drink items when ordered (or not, as the case may be). The system then provides visual and printed feedback and alerts to bookers, catering staff and others to take appropriate precautions and actions.
CABS Car Park Manager(s) – with options to manage visitor parking spaces, staff car parks, and even car park access control, you can keep it simple – spaces linked to attendance for specific meetings- or be as sophisticated as you like – including number plate recognition - with the CABS Car Park Manager modules.
CABS Membership Manager is great if your organisation has any type of membership that is associated with the booking of spaces. This could include sports and fitness facilities, performance spaces, practice areas or things like hotdesking zones and co-working facilities. Supporting individual and group membership schemes, the CABS Membership Manager could be just the piece of functionality that you need to give you a true integrated, end-to-end solution for all your booking needs.
CABS Ticketing Manager brings a whole new dimension to managing your spaces. Whether or not you charge for the tickets, and whether or not you have designated seats, the CABS Ticketing Manager brings everything together in one place from the booking of the event space, the provision of services etc to put the event on, to tracking planned and actual attendance right down to named individuals. In a data-driven world, how can you possibly manage without it?
CABS Data Dictionary and Flexible Reporting Licence. CABS is shipped with a comprehensive library of reports, all of which can be viewed as PDFs, exported to MS Excel or MS Work or sent to a good old printer. Business Careware is also able to create enhanced versions of these reports or brand-new ones to client specifications, quickly and at very reasonable prices, meaning that the right information is always at your fingertips to help your decision making.
However, the CABS Data Dictionary and Flexible Reporting Licence is designed for organisations that have an on-going and dynamic requirement to access the wealth of data held within the CABS database for themselves. However, if your organisation has the resources to take this on, and the constant need to keep this up, then the CABS Data Dictionary is a must- converting the transaction processing structure and nomenclature of the database into logically structured data sources with “plain English” file and field names, speeding up the time it takes to create accurate and informative output.
CABS Two-way API. Like all the best software in the world, CABS has its own application programming interface (API), which means that CABS can be integrated with other key systems that input to and/or take output from it. Examples include: card swipe systems for attendance, security systems for access control, staff rostering systems for staffing requirements management, point of sale systems for payment or usage data, external booking request feeds (e.g., external websites), CRM systems, 3rd party video conferencing systems – including Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting and others.
