Neil Mukerji
2017 Winter Report
It’s 2018, so I’d like to start by wishing our followers, clients, and their customers a Happy New Year!
We are proud to have concluded 2017 with a healthy 88% net growth in Kobas EPoS venues across the calendar year, creating significant and exciting opportunities for 2018. The Christmas trading period certainly looked lively, as we saw in excess of £80,000 per hour and £4,500 per minute at times across our network.
We are delighted to be working with so many successful, experienced and supportive operators, and look forward to channelling their ideas and feedback into our offering.
I’d like to publicly thank our team for their resilience, brilliance, commitment and operational excellence in 2017. The fruits of their efforts are laid bare for all to see in our 2017 Change Logs for Cloud and EPoS.
Support
Our extended standard support hours are proving worthwhile, with a variety of clients enjoying additional support at evenings and weekends. I volunteered to opt-out of any New Year’s Eve shenanigans to oversee extended emergency support that Sunday night into the small hours of Monday morning, and was rewarded with a very quiet evening on the support desk, which was much appreciated. A reminder of our three support levels and how they work:
Core Business Hours
10:00 to 18:00, UK business days. The majority of our team are available at these times. During Core Business Hours, accounts are pro-actively managed, finances reconciled, product development happens, EPoS rigs are built and those brilliant ideas for the future are planned.
Standard Support Hours
09:00-21:00 Monday to Friday UK business days.
12:00-21:00 Saturday, Sunday & UK public holidays. *
* Emergency support only on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day
Our Support team is available during these times to help with scheduled EPoS equipment installations, item replacements, Kobas account management queries, and of course operational support incidents. While we commit to acknowledge all new requests within two hours inside this window, we understand a rapid response is crucial to holding confidence in our support offering. We therefore strive to respond as quickly as possible, and tickets are flagged with our support manager if we do not respond within half an hour.
Emergency Support Hours
Outside of Standard Support Hours we continue to monitor support emails. Nominated members of our team will receive push notifications to their smart phones when new support emails arrive, and any operationally critical cases will be addressed as swiftly as possible. Non-critical emails will be addressed the following business day.
Product
Rota Creator
We’ve spent over £50,000 developing an all new rota creator, which we released as a public Beta in November 2017. With over 2,000 rota shifts now created, it’s fair to say its already making lives easier at hospitality venues across the country. Soon, the Beta tag will be removed and the legacy mode deprecated. Find out more about the new rota creator.
Allergens
Our ingredient and till item allergen system is nearly here. Initially it’ll be possible to use Kobas Cloud to export and print an allergen list for your venue, and then we’ll add allergen support to the EPoS units themselves.
HR Improvements and GDPR Compliance
We’ve made a number of small but useful improvements to the Kobas Cloud HR section in recent months, especially around the staff export, and the introduction of a former staff export. In this coming quarter we will be reviewing staff data retention policies in order to ensure compliance with the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation in May.
Infrastructure
The scheduled maintenance event in the early hours of Monday 27th November was completed successfully without notable interruption of service. As a result, Kobas Cloud now has complete automated fail-over coverage, and we’ve doubled our computational resource. These combine to ensure we are prepared for significant growth in 2018, though we will of course continue to monitor the situation as usage grows.
There was a brief Kobas Cloud outage of under 5 minutes on Thursday 21st December, caused by human error during a routine configuration change. That, and the scheduled maintenance aside, Kobas Cloud has been completely stable in 2017 Q4, and in fact since July 9th.
This means we exceeded our goal of 99.99% uptime this quarter, as monitored by our third party supplier, Pingdom.
