How an Australian Software Company Creates Products for the Hospitality Industry While Collaborating Remotely
Remote collaboration made simpler for the entire team — thanks to zipBoard
King Street Computers was founded in 1980 by Michael O’Neill and have been building software for the hospitality industry since. In over 30 years of operations they have provided software services to resorts and clubs all over Australia.
Matthew Betland is the current owner of the company and was kind enough to share his company’s story with us.
The company and their products
King Street Computers is serving a thriving hospitality industry in Australia which has strong ties with the community. Supporting the community with the necessary infrastructure, for events like promoting sporting activities and veteran welfare, is a core part of the hospitality culture.
To ensure that the industry has the tools necessary to serve their clients, King Street Computers develops software solutions which help organizations develop management facilities and ensure smooth operations. They have a team capable of building applications on a variety of technologies like JAVA and PHP.
“The products we provide are Payroll, Accounts GL, Membership, Poker Machine Analytics, Asset Register and Ticket printing”, says Matthew.
Automated entries for bill payments and annual budgets, management of membership renewals and reporting, maintenance of assets, and management of poker machines are some of the benefits for these products.
User friendly functionality is the focus for KSC. The software packages allow for simple input systems, clean design and layout, and faster processing of data.
How the team works
However, the team behind King Street Computers is highly distributed. On their team setup, Matt told us,
“We have a small local team of 5 in Australia which consists of me, 3 support staff/quality assurance and an admin officer. Apart from that, we have another team of 3 in Italy which consists of a programmer, developer and designer.
The Australian team all work from home but are located in the same region so we do catch up in person regularly. The Italian team members work out of an office together.”
We also discussed how the team collaborates and what tools they use.
We use Office 365, VoIP phone system and TeamViewer to provide support to our customer base. For our project work we use Project Libre and zipBoard for testing/QA.”
We use ProjectLibre for our Gantt chart to track timeline and goals and zipBoard for QA and testing/tracking of incidents.
After each milestone a new version is released on our current project and we then use zipBoard to track the changes for each build and pass tasks between QA testing and the development teams to manage. We currently have limited client involvement as we are in late alpha stages currently but when we move into beta we have clients willing to be part of a pilot group who will then be introduced to zipBoard to capture suggestions/bugs.”
How does King Street Computers benefit from zipBoard
Matt was also kind enough to tell us why his team liked zipBoard and how they use it:
“I introduced zipBoard as a tool for the team because we needed a way to actively show team members in different locations what we wanted to do and how, and zipBoard does this really well.
We currently have 7 collaborators on this one project. As of now, we spend at least 15 hours a week working in zipBoard but this will increase when we get closer to release. It has saved us a lot of time and opened up communication between everyone involved.”
King Street Computers have built an incredibly loyal customer base over their 35 years of operations. Their customers, like Coronation Club and Collarenebri Club, testify to the ease of using KSC products and the delightful support behind it. Some of these customers have been with King Street Computers for 30 years. KSC’s solid legacy and drive to serve the hospitality industry in Australia ties in seamlessly with Matthew’s passion for software development.
Matt: “I have been the owner of King Street Computers for 5 months. Before that, I have been in IT infrastructure for the past 20 years and have long dreamed of owning my own business in the IT space. I love working in the software design/development space and have always had a passion for this field.”
We’re glad zipBoard is helping support Matthew’s passion and King Street Computer’s success. :)
Read all the nice things our other customers have said about zipBoard here.
zipBoard is the perfect solution for teams to solve remote collaboration problems while tracking issues across developers, designers, managers and quality assurance personnel. There’s no setup or training needed, and you can even get your end users into the loop now. Read how, here.
