Douglas City Council operates 2 cemeteries and 1 crematorium on the Isle of Man and has been providing bereavement services to local families for over 112 years.
Having implemented PlotBox in 2024, Bereavement Services Manager Sarah Statham tells us why they made the switch from their old system and the positive impact it's having on their cemetery and crematorium operations.
The full bereavement team is 3 staff including myself. In addition to that there are 4 gardeners who maintain the 2 cemetery grounds as well as the more hands on part of burials.
We provide a complete cremation service, ranging from direct cremations to full services.
In addition, all burials in the 2 Douglas cemeteries are handled through us.
We also have several memorial areas we maintain. We are the point of contact for all bereavement/burial related enquiries for the City of Douglas.
Not so much challenges as just a different way of working. As it’s a small island community we have quite a different relationship with our funeral directors to the norm.
It is much more informal and friendly and whilst it works great in many ways it can present issues when we want to make changes.
Having wanted a bespoke system for years, I was delighted when our old system which is tied in with a legacy highly customized version of Microsoft Dynamics (Navision) started to near its end of life.
When the decision was finally made to replace this, it meant we had to move the bereavement data into a more modern system.
The key for us was that the system had to be fully featured for all the services we offer.
We didn’t want to be signing into separate systems for separate functions.
Ease of use was also very important, as well being web-based. We wanted a modern responsive solution that we could use on the move if needed. Of course, cost was a factor as well.
Out of all the solutions we looked at it was the one that stood out as meeting all our requirements.
The functionality of it really appealed to me personally, amongst many things, the fact that you could link everything to one location with all the information readily available without having to search through the old records and files was brilliant.
Not really. We were mostly paper-based, with electronic records being kept after the fact, so adjusting this for PlotBox was relatively straight forward.
We have changed the order in which we do a few things to make sure the data hits PlotBox at the earliest opportunity, thus saving us time later, and we are now able to scan paperwork for cremation and burials.
The end result is a much larger source of single data, and it has made dealing with queries far easier for us.
Because our legacy systems only kept a limited amount of data, the migration process was relatively straight forward for us.
Our IT team extracted the data tables from our current system, and we provided several CSV files to PlotBox [who] took care of the rest.
The Data Acceptance Testing process went well and any feedback we provided was actioned really quickly by the team at PlotBox.
There were several challenges with this. First of all being a small island with interrupted travel services meant getting the drone operator from PlotBox here was probably the biggest hurdle!
Secondly, all our existing plot maps were on paper, some laminated, dating from decades ago.
Our IT team spent a large amount of time photographing and stitching these to provide PlotBox with accurate plot maps that could be overlaid onto the drone aerial photographs.
We are delighted with the end result.
The detailed maps and easy plot lookups have been transformational in the service we can offer to customers looking to find relatives' graves.
Besides more accurate and consistent record keeping, the main benefit has been in the way we can deal with family queries.
Having so much information in one place and easily searchable does make a difference.
On the cremation side, being able to enter paperwork when received instead of holding out for all papers, and then being able to print out all associated paperwork instead of handwriting everything has also streamlined the process.
In all honesty, it was one of the elements we were most nervous about.
We have a close relationship with all our funeral directors, so we were nervous about enforcing changes. We have genuinely been surprised at how well they have adapted to it and now the vast majority of all bookings are made through the funeral director portal.
After some initial feedback and tweaks, they have settled into using it without any real issues.
As we are only open Monday to Friday, the portal gives them access to the diary 24/7, so this means when speaking to families they are able to give them a confirmation of when the service will be, as we have a lot of families travelling from, sometimes, all over the world, this allows them to start making travel arrangements sooner rather than later.
I’m also confident that over time they will start to add more information when booking.
We tend to follow a lot of UK legislation and ICCM codes of practice. Using PlotBox, we can maintain our records to a high standard digitally, including copies of certificates etc, as well as keeping a record of cremations.
It also allows us to track owners of graves and any transfers that take place.
The move to PlotBox was like going from driving a car to piloting a space shuttle for us.
It was a huge change, but the team has adapted well. It is an easy to use system and we’ve found repetition builds confidence, even in those members of staff who have always seen themselves as ‘not computer people’.
I’ve loved using PlotBox and I’m going to be sad to leave it behind when I leave my post!
We’ve only had the system since November 2024, but I’m confident that the staff will continue to use it to its full potential going forward.
The training was superb. Each session was about the right amount of time and not overbearing.
Having a test system available to practice what was being shown after was of great help. The support team also made themselves available so when we did forget anything help was on hand.
Overall, the support and training was one of the best parts of our PlotBox experience.
Absolutely, from start to finish the whole process has been a pleasure for me, the staff support is brilliant, and the ease of use is fantastic.
It’s drastically reduced the time we spend searching through records, collating information, producing required paperwork etc.
Working with PlotBox is more of a partnership and you know they are always approachable for problems or ideas.
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