Oracle Customer Success—Arena One GmbH

Arena One Achieves 60% Faster Checkout in Canteen Operations Thanks to Flexible, Cashless, and Fully Integrated Hospitality Management Solution

We chose Oracle Hospitality Simphony for our Business Campus Munich canteen because of the high quality, reliability, speed, and reporting capabilities of the solution, the easily configurable payment card, and, not least, the excellent support.

— Steffen Weeke, Head of Points-of-Sale Systems, Arena One GmbH

Arena One, founded in 2004, is a full-service hospitality provider for sports, business, and cultural events of any type and size. The company provides hospitality services at sports stadiums and VIP events, staff cafeterias and canteens, and popular entertainment venues for more than 1.8 million guests per year. Its end-to-end services include event management, catering, and logistics—before, during, and after the event. Arena One operates through 24 locations in Germany, and is the exclusive caterer of Munich’s Allianz Arena, as well as Bayern Munich football club. Arena One is a subsidiary of the DO & CO Group, Austria’s leading caterer with a presence on three continents.

Business Challenge

Deploy a reliable, high-efficiency point-of-sale (POS) solution to support exceptional guest experience at the Business Campus Munich canteen, where up to 2,000 guests can arrive during lunch
Create a cashless payment system to ensure the fastest possible guest checkout while eliminating both the security and hygiene issues inherent to cash operations

Allow guests to make payments in the business park restaurant using a reloadable cash card, with flexibility to adapt to customer-specific requirements such as enabling guests to pay with their company badge
Enable centralized access to real-time financial data, such as costs of goods and materials used, to provide comprehensive controlling and ensure transparent monthly settlements with Arena One’s customers—the employers located at the Business Campus Munich
Allow Arena One to manage up to 24 canteens across Germany with a single hospitality management system by deploying a canteen solution that can be scaled easily and cost-effectively

Deployed Oracle Hospitality Simphony as a hospitality management platform at the Business Campus Munich canteen to enable end-to-end optimization of canteen processes for hundreds of guests simultaneously—running seven checkouts without a single minute of downtime since solution deployment in 2013
Achieved 60% faster checkout compared to a cash-based POS solution by deploying Oracle Hospitality Simphony Point of Sale Client together with Oracle MICROS Workstation 5A, enabling Arena One to complete a guest checkout, including food delivery and payment, within 10 to 15 seconds

Enabled visitors to use a single reloadable cash card for making payments in the business park restaurant—including at coffee machines—driving guest satisfaction while eliminating the risks of cash-based operations such as calculation errors, theft, and hygiene issues
Gained full ownership of the canteen’s payment card and the ability to add features such as discounts for employees of specific companies, without having to pay for development
Enabled canteen staff to focus exclusively on guest service, and ensure that each of 2,000 lunch guests is served and checked out within five minutes of order placement, facilitated by a fast and reliable hospitality platform
Provided real-time, web-based reporting capabilities with Oracle Hospitality Reporting and Analytics Standard Cloud Service, enabling effective revenue and cost control by giving financial staff direct access to financial data, including drill-downs such as cost of goods per meal, articles sold, revenue per period, and revenue per employee
Gained the ability to monitor staff performance and drive continuous improvements in canteen operations by analyzing employees’ checkout speed with Oracle Hospitality Reporting and Analytics out-of-the-box reports
Enabled airtight financial settlement with Arena One’s customers at Business Campus Munich—companies that are legally obliged to contribute to employee meal costs—by automatically deducting the employer’s contribution from a guest’s bill at checkout, and providing companies with a personalized bill at month-end that enables easy declaration of employee non-monetary benefits to tax authorities
Ensured punctual month-end closing by providing financial staff with direct access to all financial information and the ability to issue customer invoices on time without the need for IT staff intervention, while complying with the reporting duties of market-listed mother company DO & CO Group
Ensured scalability to expand the solution to numerous Arena One canteens across Germany and streamline operations with a single repository of master data

Oracle Hospitality Simphony is by far the most cost-effective system, because it offers enormous value for money, and is completely reliable. Furthermore, Oracle acts on our suggestions for improvement, and the support is legendary.

— Steffen Weeke, Head of Points-of-Sale Systems, Arena One GmbH

Execution

“Implementation took place while our restaurant was relocating. Oracle undertook extensive development work to fulfill our need for a freely-programmable payment card, and, after a little user training for the new software, we went live with a local client-server installation with seven checkouts in a little over a month,” Weeke said.