Eat to the Beat

Eat to the Beat is part of Global Infusion Group. They provide artist, production and crew catering for the music, entertainment, film and TV industries: world tours, film locations, one-off shows and dressing room riders. Their clients are bands, artists and productions, and the operation runs wherever the work is.

Catering a for a tour is not the same as catering in a static location. The kitchen moves, the dates shift, and every project needs a particular set of people with a particular set of skills in a particular country on a particular day.

The Challenge

Eat to the Beat work with around 750 freelancers. The whole thing was being run on a shared Excel file and paper.

Every project starts with a staffing need: x number of chefs, x number of front of house, with skills, availability and proximity to the locations. Someone then has to find the people who match, offer them the work, wait to hear back, and start again on the ones who say no. Multiply that by a touring schedule and a live project board and the spreadsheet becomes a full-time job in itself.

On top of the staffing there was compliance. Freelancers need current food safety documentation, and Eat to the Beat need to be able to evidence it. With 750 people on the books, chasing certificates by email is not a process, it is a permanent backlog.

And because Global Infusion Group run on SAP, every freelancer engaged on a project needs a purchase order raised against them. That was manual re-keying of data that already existed somewhere else.

Why Alpaka Was the Starting Point

The enquiry came from Mary Shelley-Smith, Business Director at Eat to the Beat, who already knew Alpaka from previous work in the events industry.

Alpaka already holds personnel records, and the rota already plots skills against time. That is the core of what Eat to the Beat were trying to do in a spreadsheet, so the fit with the industry and the process was there from the first conversation.

What was not there was the rest of it. So we did what we always do: looked at the gap between what Alpaka does today and what the client needs, and scoped the difference.

Alpaka is a software company. We are not a reseller and we are not shipping someone else's platform with our name on it. Being asked to break new ground is a normal part of taking on a new client, and we are set up for it: a small, highly skilled team, no investors, and no appetite for carrying technical debt. Product is king above everything else.

That has one important consequence. Everything we build goes into the shared application. Anything we scope has to be either an enhancement to what is already there or genuinely useful new ground, and it has to be non-destructive for every other client using it. Which means the work we did for Eat to the Beat is now part of Alpaka for everyone, and most of our clients use some of it.

What We Built

Skills by location

A view that presents the available skills geographically, so a project manager can select freelancers who hold the required skills and are in the right place for the work. This is the first move in staffing any project and it used to be a filter-and-scroll exercise in Excel.

A third rota status: Offer

Alpaka rotas have always had two states, draft and confirmed. Pencil and ink. That works because the typical Alpaka rota user is steering a team they control, so they mark the shift and there is no round trip to find out whether the person is willing to do it.

Freelancers are different. You cannot allocate them, you can only ask them. So we added a third status to the rota view: Offer. Eat to the Beat can now offer a shift to someone rather than assign it, and the rota reflects the real state of play while the answer is outstanding.

Automatic notification, and a secure way to answer

An offer triggers a notification to the freelancer, along with a personalised, secure link where they can accept or reject the work. The answer comes straight back into the rota. No phone tag, no reply-all, and no separate record of who has said what.

Self-certified compliance

Alpaka already holds compliance data against a person, including qualifications and skills that expire, and reports on compliance across the organisation. The gap at this volume was collection. So we built a route for freelancers to supply and certify their own food safety documentation directly, which turns 750 individual chases into an exception report.

Fitness to work, three days before the first shift

For each project the working freelancers have to certify that they are free from illness three days before they start. On a tour or a long-running production, that is not three days before the project starts. It is three days before their first shift, which might be several weeks in.

So we built an awareness of first shift at a project level for each individual, and a trigger that fires the right communication to that freelancer at the right time. They close the loop with a certified signature online.

SAP purchase orders

Global Infusion Group issue purchase orders to freelancers for each project they are engaged on. We built an automated workflow to transfer the employment data out of Alpaka and into their SAP system, so the engagement is raised from the record that already exists rather than typed in a second time.

A register-style rota report

The final piece was a new way to download and print a rota. It does not look like the grid of shifts. It reads as a register of names per day, with each person's designated task and skill alongside. For a site lead standing in a production kitchen, that is a far more useful piece of paper than a grid.

The Outcome

Eat to the Beat run their freelance workforce out of one system instead of a shared file and a paper trail. Staffing a project starts from skills and location rather than memory. Offers go out automatically and answers come back into the rota. Compliance is collected from the people who hold it. Fitness declarations fire against each person's own start date. Purchase orders reach SAP without re-keying. On-site leaders get a register they can actually work from.