Michael Heseltine, IT manager, Orchid Group

What has been the most important technological advance to your business in the last few years, and why?

We are in the unique position of starting from scratch, having taken over 290 pubs a little over a year ago. That meant that we had to have a fairly robust strategy.

The main thing we have done is to implement a wide area network, enabling connection to all of the Spirit pubs.

The private network enables us to connect to all our pubs and restaurants, but, more importantly, it allows them to have a fast

and secure connection.

It provides a very secure outlet, so even credit-card transactions are completely secure, but six times faster than the norm, because everyone is given 2MB broadband. We use it to extract maximum benefit from any technologies that are out there.

How important has EPoS become to unlocking a pub's business potential?

I have a background in EPoS, so I know just how important

it is. EPoS is crucial - it's essential for all retail companies.

In addition to our standard food menus, we have a number of "bolt on" menus, say for barbecues and even bizarre things like funeral buffets.

It's all very complicated so you need a very robust EPoS platform to be able to handle it accurately.

All offers, promotions and discounts are completely reliant on the EPoS platform. In such a segmented market it's completely unthinkable for a pub operator of any more than 20 pubs not to have one.

All pubcos need to be able to track, control, understand and develop their businesses. Those objectives are not possible without the granularity and quality of data that a good EPoS produces.

In a venture capitalist-led business such as ours we need to produce management reports quickly, because everything is about the bottom-line profit.

It's probably the most important part of the business, other than the actual handling of food and beer over the bar.

What EPoS does your pubco use? Which of its features are the most important to a pub estate and how has the system developed over time?

We inherited from Spirit nine other EPoS platforms. What we required above all when replacing the disparate platforms was ease of use when serving the customer. For that reason we picked Zonal. I believe that their tills are the strongest point - they are simple, effective and reliable.

It is no mean feat to put 305 units onto a standard platform in 55 days, but we did it. Our EPoS will definitely be integrated further over time but first things first - it is the people who are serving the customers, and the customers themselves, that are the priority.

We inherited 56 menus, and we'll mark those down to eight. In my line of work you need to make sure that your IT strategy aligns with the business strategy. I don't want a pristine head-office environment and not support the pubs.

If anything it should be the other way round - support the pubs first and then look after head office later.

Which business intelligence system do you use? How far does it integrate into your other software packages (accounts, online ordering, payroll etc), and do you plan to integrate it further over time?

We are a very young pubco and are developing huge data management potential. At present we've got several data streams for individual reporting tools, and we do use a management information system (MIS) module from Zonal.

We are planning a business intelligence solution, which I can't talk too much about at the moment. We've got to integrate all of that and interrogate our other systems, including, obviously, the Zonal EPoS data, the Sun accounting data and electronic ordering.

It isn't just about how many bottles of beer were sold yesterday. There many things to analyse - we need a central business intelligence system to cover many different areas.

What technologies are lacking in pubs and could they cause the trade to fall behind other industries? Which areas are you hoping to invest in?

I believe the pub industry has fallen behind the general retail trade when it comes to providing a web-based infrastructure and control platform, which allows connectivity to the suppliers. People use broadband, but that's a long way from the secure environment you need.

Fortunately, we are backed by a very forward-thinking company in GI Partners who fully understand the self-sufficiency strategy that we are trying to achieve. Our IT partners Compufix Computer Services (CCS) have delivered a totally reliable Cisco end-to-end platform. The routers that we have in place are a big investment - they are nearly £1,000 each - but we recognise that they run our business, and therefore have to be extremely robust.

Telemetry might be one for the future, even if it's first something as straightforward as automated meter readings.