Practical notes, no theatre.
Hotel IT, food manufacturing, sport horse auctions, Microsoft 365, the actual work. Written by the team doing it, not a content mill.
Taking on a new property: the technology checklist before the first guest
Openings and acquisitions are where hotel technology problems are created. The checklist we run before the keys change hands.
Every property has a different IT supplier. What head office loses
Groups grow by acquisition and each hotel arrives with its own suppliers, contracts and habits. The cost is not the invoices. It is that nobody can see the whole estate.
Guest WiFi complaints: the five causes we actually find in Irish hotels
It is rarely the broadband. It is the building, the access points, the guest and staff traffic sharing one network, and nobody owning the whole thing.
Why the warehouse and the accounts never agree on stock
The stock count says one thing, the system says another, and the accountant asks at year end. The gap is not theft or carelessness. It is timing and double entry.
Customer specific pricing and the invoice queries it creates
Every customer has a deal. The deals live in heads, emails and a spreadsheet. Every wrong price is a query, a credit and a little less trust.
Orders arrive by phone, email and WhatsApp. How Irish wholesalers stop retyping them
Nobody chose four order channels. Customers did. The cost is not the channels, it is the retyping and the mistakes that follow.
Looking for a Sage or Surf alternative? Your accounts package probably isn't the problem
Food producers go looking for a new accounts system when the real pain is orders, batches and dispatch being forced through it. Change the accounts and the pain moves. Here is a better question.
Pallet labels, retailer codes and use by dates: why labelling eats a morning a week
Every retailer wants their own code, their own label and their own date format. The printing is easy. The looking up is what costs the time.
Batch traceability for a small Irish food producer: what the auditor actually asks, and why the spreadsheet fails the question
You can trace a batch. It just takes two people and an afternoon. Here is what a retailer audit or a recall drill really asks for, and where the workbook breaks.
The server nobody wants to touch
It still runs. Nobody is certain what depends on it. That combination is one of the most common operational risks we find, and one of the easiest to reduce.
Why your two systems don't talk, and what it takes to fix
Most integration problems are not technical. They are unresolved decisions about which system is allowed to be right. Here is how we work through them.
When a spreadsheet quietly becomes a system
Nobody decides to run the business on a spreadsheet. It happens one useful column at a time. Here is how to tell when yours has crossed the line, and what to do about it.
Why we built Keystone for Irish food makers. And who it's for next
An Irish artisan dairy was still running on spreadsheets. The software most ERPs sell food makers doesn't fit their day. Keystone is the answer. And here's the story.