Manchester Crematorium: Enhancing the Digital Experience with PlotBox

Manchester Crematorium is the second oldest crematorium in the UK. It has a long history of serving the local area, as well as links to the formation of the Federation of Cremation and Burial Authorities (FBCA) itself.

We spoke with General Manager Andrew Jordan to find out know how PlotBox is helping them to modernise their systems and processes.

What does your role at The Manchester Crematorium entail?

As General Manager I'm in charge of the day-to-day running of the business side of the crematorium, as well as managing the staff, who [in turn] manage the crematorium and the grounds - I look after everything on behalf of the board.

What size of a team do you have?

There’s 16 of us here. We have over a hundred shareholders, and the board is made up of 6 people, including me. So we’re quite a small team, really.

We carry out around 2,000 cremations a year, and on top of that we have memorials on the grounds. I describe ourselves as a rose garden with a crematorium attached.

The grounds are beautiful.

What history does the crematorium have within the local community?

We’ve been here for over 130 years and are the second oldest crematorium in the UK. We opened in 1892.

The business started in 1890 with the formation of the Manchester Cremation Society, as it was known then, and in 1892, they opened the crematorium.

Then we became The Manchester Crematorium Ltd, which is still the same company that was set up in 1892. It's not been bought out by anybody. We're not owned by the Co-op or any other big conglomerate.

There's still a family link to the original inception of the crematorium, as well as some of the governing body. The grandfather of the chairman of the board was one of the founders, along with another board member, and was the first secretary of the Federation of Burial and Cremation Authorities (FBCA).

So the crematorium has a massive history in the UK when it comes to cremation and the rules we go by today.

Why did you decide to switch from your previous solution?

I've been in the industry for 14 years. I worked at a previous crematorium where we had a different system. We've always prided ourselves at Manchester on being at the forefront of what's going on within the industry. 

We were the first in the area to do fully abated cremations, for example, so when I came here, I saw it as an opportunity to have a look at different options.

We had a few ideas for how to manage the memorials better, because everything was paper based, [however] trying to integrate that within the admin system we had wasn't possible.

I came across PlotBox and to me it was like a one stop shop, so I looked more into the cremation software side of things rather than just mapping and memorials.

The old system did the cremation side, pretty much, but it was the memorial side of it for me…and the mapping was a big one.

As I said, everything was paper-based, right? We had plans everywhere - cellars worth of plans, and I wanted to find a way of integrating the memorials better with the system - which was something I couldn’t do [previously].

Because we’re cremation only, we always struggled on the mapping side of things, as a lot of software will concentrate only on graves,

Whereas with PlotBox, the idea is the same - the memorials for us look like graves.

They're different, but the mapping, in my opinion, can still work the same - which it does.

That’s an interesting point. People assume that mapping is only for burial plots when in actual fact, it can work just as well as you say, for memorials, columbaria, mausolea - those sorts of things. 

With that said, what did you want from a new solution - what needs didn't need to fulfill?

As well as also being a bit more modern, I wanted something that was cloud-based. When I came [here] we wanted to overhaul the business. With the old system, we had a box connected to a server in the corner. With PlotBox we’re on a hybrid cloud-based system. Now we don’t have any servers or anything like that on site.

I imagine that would have posed quite a lot of risk. Why then did you ultimately choose PlotBox?

For me, what stood out against the other systems was that you were the most forward thinking.

The impression I got from PlotBox was, “This is what we do right now, but we're always developing it. We'll never be satisfied. We'll always be looking to see how we improve on it.”.

Whereas how I felt from other providers was, “Well, we've made the system. It's worked for X amount of years. There you go. You want to buy it.”

So I was new to the business and even though we were so traditional in terms of our values, the other staff knew we could [adopt a new solution}

It was a good opportunity for staff to ‘jump on’ PlotBox, to train and go along for the ride…and hopefully, our experience can help you as well.

That’s so important, working with customers like you, to ask, “What are your challenges? What works? What doesn’t? How can we improve?”.

Yes.

What was the implementation process like for you?

It wasn't as difficult [as I thought it would be]. The apprehension beforehand was worse!

Because we’re a private company we use a third party for our data so our data came from them. Once we worked out how to get it, and how to get it cleaned and so on, it was fine.

Then you did what you did on the testing side - that was all really good.

Did you have a sandbox environment that you were able to use prior to Go-Live?

Yes, we had a ‘blank’ PlotBox we could go on to have a real play with how the system works. That was good. Then, when the data was put in for testing, that was equally as good to use.

And you really found your way around the system. We found any missing bits and quickly got on to the data team. They were really good.

The implementation was really straightforward. Then after Go-live is when you really get to grips with it.

What learning requirements did you have?

Our training consultant came for a couple of days extra training. It’s only when someone's in the office watching how we do things, we can think, “Oh, we do that, so we need this.”

So it was great. Then we had our Customer Success Manager who came for an extra couple of days training. That really helped refine how we were using the system.

We were also specific on the way we wanted our documents to look, so while she was here she was able to get them the way we wanted. 

So it was great. From post Go-Live it has been really good.

Was there a big change to your processes?

There wasn't. We've not had to change our process too much. Really, what we had to do was tweak some reports to suit.

Just a couple of documents are different, but they're now easier for us to edit. In the old system it was a report you printed and that was that, whereas with PlotBox, if you need to tweak it for whatever reason it's very easy.

That's probably my favourite bit. 

[Before] we used to have to ring our supplier if we wanted something changed, then they’d have to come and put the report on the system - it was all a bit of a pain.

And as we change things over time - the updates of the documents ourselves, with the tags etc. - we don't have to rely on you.

So that’s now something you can pretty much do instantly?

Yeah. And now that we’re online with the live chats (that we didn’t have with the old system) we’ve got that instant support. It's quick and much easier. The support side is fabulous.

Let’s talk about reporting - has PlotBox given you everything you need in that respect?

Yeah, everything we need for all of the paperwork - it’s easy to find on PlotBox. You've got the Cremation Society reports as well that we send off, numbers and that kind of thing - it’s really straightforward to use.

And also for finance reporting which is probably where our biggest hurdles were.

We have our accounts audited every year. We had an auditor come in, and they complemented the [PlotBox] system because they could find what they were looking for much easier - that’s from someone who doesn't even use it every day.

How has the reporting helped you to be more strategic?

I've started to generate reports to look at people's postcodes - to see the demographics of where people are coming to us from. There are a lot of council-operated crematories in Greater Manchester and we’re the only private one in the mix, so it’s quite a congested small area. 

Because of that, it's useful to see where people are coming from.

And also for planning.

With PlotBox I can see a lot clearer how many cremations we do a month. “What kind of cremations are we doing? Are we doing more direct cremations? Are we doing more full services?”.

“What did last year look like? Or the year before that?”. That way, going forward, I can plan better for next year. 

It certainly will help in managing the future - looking at things now and we can improve. “Oh, we're not getting funerals from that area - why is that? Where do they go for their cremations?”, and things like that.

Talk us through the mapping process - you had existing maps that drone imagery was overlaid onto?

Within the crematorium we had a lot of roses that we weren't using - they were congested. So we re-audited and redid our maps in anticipation of you coming in to do the drone flights.

The drone images taken were fantastic and we worked on overlaying them onto our maps, our drawings and things like that. That took a little bit of time, because there's so many memorials.

But the maps of the niches and the columbarium walls are very easy to use.

Tell us more about that.

PlotBox did a walk-around and took 360° images of all the memorials that we can access on the system. 

That's been really beneficial, for instance, if I or a member of staff was off-site and wanted to find where a memorial was.

When you work here, you know where you're going, so it's easy to ‘virtually’ walk through the grounds and physically find the memorial without even being on site.

And I've got good plans for that in the future, so hopefully we can allow members of the public to use that on the website, and maybe some sort of online ordering system.

That's my big vision. I’ve said I wanted a system where people could order memorials if they lived in America, without having to [physically be here].

We do find that a lot - people fly over for a funeral, and they need to get the memorial order before they go back. It’s all a bit of a rush for them, whereas this way they could go home, think about it and still do it.

That would be beneficial.

So that could potentially open up new avenues for you?

Yes, revenue, but also in trying to take a traditional industry forward a bit. With funerals, cremations and burials we can be stuck in our old traditional ways.

It's only recently that the Law Commission is doing a review on regulations - and they were set up in the early 1900s.

So the world has changed and we need to move forward with it a little bit.

You have the Funeral Director Portal - how’s that helping?

It’s reduced the amount of time we spend going back and forth answering queries on bookings.

Now they can look straight on the portal and say, “Right, this funeral's free. I'll request it.”

The funeral directors who have access to it absolutely love it.

They can upload the paperwork and we get a notification from PlotBox so it saves time on emails. It also lets funeral directors give us information right at the point of booking - so we know where the person lived and all that kind of thing.

We can also see if the person is in our system, and make sure it's all linked.

In previous systems, you could have a million John Smiths. In PlotBox you can see if John Smith passed away, if he's had a memorial here, if he’s been an applicant for a funeral before - you can make sure that’s all tied in.

So it streamlines that process and has made the funeral director’s job easier as well. They’ll go to a family on a weekend for example, which is very common, and try to arrange a funeral. Now they don't have to wait till Monday morning to get a yes for that time or date.

They pretty much know there and then whether it's available or not.

It must help when sitting with family members to be able to give them those answers that they need.

Exactly. Funeral directors used to phone us with the family in front of them, and you’d have to go through it several times. It's a very stressful time for the families.

They don't need to be privy to the phone call that the funeral director is having with the crematorium saying, “No, you can't have this or that time.”

With PlotBox, they can just go on their phone and see what times we have available.

How did you get your financial processes to where they needed to be?

I don't know what other places do, but we ran our administration system - which also managed our invoicing and receipting - alongside our accounting software, Sage.

So it just took a bit of time to get reports a certain way and to know our way around PlotBox, because it gives you so many options to search and refine.

And the export and the integration with Sage, yeah, it worked perfectly.

There was a bit of pressure to still manage the day to day while making sure we hit deadlines and year ends with auditors coming in. But everything works perfectly for us now.

We know what we're looking for. We know we've got all of our shortcuts set up on the reports, so now you don't have to click several times every time you want to search for something.

We do a journal at the end of every day and it literally sets it all up for us - we just keep adding to it.

You have a branded EverAfter site. How is that helping you to enhance your services online?

We've never had something like that at the crematorium. Even though we're the second oldest in the country, we've never had a facility where members of the public could search our records online - which is a big thing, thanks to ancestry and those kinds of things.

People love to do that kind of thing but we just never had that facility.

So when it came to signing up with PlotBox, adding EverAfter was a no-brainer.

Have you had much success with people using it?

Yes. We direct people there. If people phone us up and ask if we can search the records, we'll do that, but we'll also tell them that they can use the online system.

You have a lot of people doing their family history - they'll use the system.

We do have people coming in saying, “Oh, does this person have a memorial? Because I found that they were cremated here.” That kind of thing.

And you attached photos to memorials?

Yes, we've got something like 8,000 images attached to all of our records for memorials out there, and we've got iPads that we can upload pictures onto.

So if a family rings up from America or somewhere further afield, we can send them a picture, saying, “Yes, it’s still in lease, and here's a picture of it.”.

It streamlined that process as well. [Previously] we'd have to go out, take a photograph and come back. Now we can just send it straight from the system.

That must help your sales processes?

Yes, when you load it up to the plots module you can see all the different colors that show what’s available and what isn’t.

It helps knowing exactly what's free and what's not because there's a lot of memorials still out in our grounds with plaques that we don't want to take down (because they look nice), but are actually available to be purchased.

So in terms of your inventory management, it's giving you a greater level of control?

Yes, then we can see, “Okay, do we need to develop another wall? Are we running out of space? Do we need to find another memorial in this area?”.

And so yes, it really helps us see all that, almost like a heat map.

Let’s go back to something you touched on earlier.  How has PlotBox helped in terms of mitigating risk? Specifically the security and accessibility of your records.

All of our data was stored on a server in the office - all of the cremation records we've had for the last 130 years were all stored on it.

We had a backup, but even that's still in the office, so it wouldn’t take much for that [to create a problem].

Cloud-based is the way everything is going now - Microsoft, everything, all of it's cloud-based.

So when we were looking to upgrade our software security, one of the recommendations that was made by the company was to get away from manual, physical servers.

That helps us tenfold to comply with what our management company was wanting us to do for a good while.

That definitely seems to be a must have now for any businesses really, but particularly, as you say, with having records going back to 1892. If you were to lose all of that, that’s so much history.

But it also means when I’m away from the business, if someone phones me to look at something, I don't have to plug into the computer here. I can do it wherever.

Speaking of compliance, you obviously have a lot of documentation to keep up with, how does PlotBox help you with that?

With the cremations and the paperwork side, if you don't have a digital copy, you have to keep the physical one, for 2 years.

So PlotBox allowed us to really streamline that.

On our old system we did have every bit of paper here scanned (because when I arrived we had 15 years worth of paperwork downstairs). When I had everything scanned, it was on a separate system, but with PlotBox, everything scanned is attached to the individual record.

Now all I have to do now is go into someone's cremation record, and the paperwork's all there.

Before, I'd've had to search another system. So that's really really helped us. And we don't have to keep paperwork anymore.

That keeps us compliant with all the regulations relating to paperwork.

If there are any issues, or someone disputes something, we've got signed paperwork that we can produce.

Also, in terms of things being time-stamped, you now have a record in terms of when changes were made, and when things happened.

You can see whenever someone's made a change to a record. Whenever someone's done anything to edit one of the records. If someone does something wrong, you can see who it is and what’s going on.

That's really helpful with the funerals.

[Where there’s a discrepancy] we can go back and say, “Well, actually, you booked this time on such a day, at such a time.”.

It’s been really useful, because it's quite easy for something like that to happen in an industry where everything's usually done over the phone.

You use PlotBox for managing work orders. How’s that help to streamline processes?

Yes, we use work orders a lot. That’s because we’re basically a rose garden with a crematorium attached.

A lot of the roses have to be replaced and checked. Members of the public will say, “My rose doesn't look very good. Can you go and have a [look].

We've got the cremation admin side of the team, and then we've got the gardeners and the operations manager. We produce work orders for them to go and report back.

And it's all in one system. So there's no bits of paper on notes, or post-it notes lying around with, “Oh, can you ring this person? Or when was that?”.

It’s all streamlined.

They’re then able to upload photographs and attach it to the record, which enables us to answer the query.

We've got the confidence when dealing with it that we can see what they're seeing.

You spoke about plans for using your 360° imagery in the future. Has PlotBox opened up any other avenues for you for the future?

I can definitely see the advantages of the system and how adaptive it is, and all the future research and development. We can tell you an idea that we have and you’ll go away, then all of a sudden - it appears!

What’s the support been like?

We've got the live help. That happens pretty instantly. It’s not like the AI you have on other websites - here you actually speak to somebody. There's no query too small. There's nothing silly - we can just ask.

Everyone's really helpful.

One final question, then, would you recommend PlotBox to other crematorium operators?

Definitely and I think I've done it a couple of times.  It's a change if you're on another system - one that's been around for a while maybe - but it's definitely worth it.

I definitely wouldn't hesitate in recommending it.

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