News
Barchester backs up BACS
29 July 2008
Care home company Barchester Healthcare has signed a contract with
BACScontingency.com for the provision of a back-up service in the event
of a failure of its BACS payment system.
Founded in 1993 in Gloucestershire, Barchester Healthcare runs over
170 care homes throughout the UK, offering high quality care to over
10,000 residents and employing over 14,000 members of staff.
The company is heavily reliant on access to the Bacstel-IP system for
the payment of staff and suppliers and the collection of 1,500 private
residents’ fees via direct debit.
Calum MacLeod, IT Director at Barchester Healthcare, explains the
significance of this: “We have already made payments to over 23,000
suppliers in 2008, the timing of which could affect the continued supply
of their services, including such vital resources as electricity.
“More critically, over 7,000 members of staff are paid on the same
day every month. If we experienced a fault in the payroll system that
prevented payment on that day, a large number of our staff would be
directly affected, and this is a scenario we did not wish to
contemplate. We needed to insure ourselves against this possibility and
BACScontingency.com offered an ideal and highly affordable solution.”
The key business application servers which administer the whole of
the company are located on one site to which every home is connected via
ADSL. All of the processing is managed here, which makes this data
centre critical to the company in terms of business continuity.
Barchester Healthcare has never missed a payroll date in the ten
years that MacLeod has worked for the company, which he puts down to a
fully developed business continuity plan.
MacLeod explains, “We strive to prepare for every eventuality. We
have multiple PCs operating in the central administration centre and
three ISP connections that we allocate on a round-robin basis. We also
have a standby site in London in case of an emergency. However, the
strength of any chain is ultimately determined by its weakest link, and
we were still experiencing internet downtime which left us facing risks.
“In the event of our BACS system failing us, we know that
BACScontingency.com can process the bank transmissions on our behalf. We
have not had to rely on the service yet; however, this gives us enormous
peace of mind and safeguards the quality of our services and the
continued operation of the business.”
MacLeod concludes, “It was an easy decision for us to set up a BACS
contingency service. It is the best value for money that we can get in
terms of disaster recovery, giving us the highest return for our
investment of all of our business continuity strategies. I believe that
any business with a sizeable payroll and a reasonable number of
suppliers should consider building this into their BACS system as a
matter of necessity.”
|
