Past work: consulting

Project Management of Software Implementation and Operations Improvements at Catering Company

O’Malley’s Catering and Rentals is a full-service catering company that has been serving the Greater Toronto Area since the 1980’s. As a consultant, I worked directly with the company’s Head Chef and President to implement a cloud-based event management and catering software and create new processes around this shift in their operations.

The current President did not have a chance to introduce new technology to the business since taking it over from the previous owner. Prior to implementing the software solution, the company was taking client orders and issuing invoices manually, or using a series of separate tools such as MS Excel and Word, resulting in inefficiencies occurring along the entire process from the order process, to production, delivery, and billing. While the company had always had an excellent reputation within its service area, many of these errors would result in internal losses for the company in the form of decreased profits, and so on.

My role as a consultant at the company was in working directly with the President and the General Manager in the following ways:

• Gaining full understanding of which features of Caterease would benefit the company the most

• Working directly with the customization and deployment team at Caterease to ensure the software was set up to the specifications we had requested

• Typically, Caterease would work directly with their clients to book training sessions and often the training is very general. In order to maximize the President and General Manager’s time, learned the company’s entire catering and event process, and created customized training sessions that I delivered to them on the job.

• Adapting Caterease’s general help guide to reflect information specific to the company and their process and created a procedures manual (see below screenshot)

• Guiding the company in improving various processes in the office, sales room, kitchen, rentals department, and delivery department as a result of the introduction of Caterease

While there was no previous data to work with to measure the outcomes of the project, I can confidently say the following was achieved, particularly since feedback was provided by the client and staff on an ongoing basis:

• Improved ordering experience for both customers and managers

• More accurate quotation and invoicing

• More clarity in issuing banquet event orders and delivery process