Project Description
Northgate Resorts Saves 200 Compliance Hours with One Onspring Integration
A GRC Management Case Study
OVERVIEW
If you’ve ever considered a family camping vacation in the U.S., chances are you may have looked into a Northgate Resorts property. Northgate Resorts is a prominent campground operator with 30 locations across 16 states. As a franchisee of Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts and the operator of a Camp Margaritaville location in Louisiana, Northgate Resorts operates the most awarded camp-resort portfolio in the country, including the recent launch of its own innovative brand of campgrounds, Camp Fimfo, which combines a vintage camping vibe with a focus on family fun.
This expansion and uptick in popularity—particularly during pandemic-induced growth—meant that Northgate faced many growth-related challenges in managing compliance, environmental reporting, and operational tasks. They answered those challenges with Onspring by centralizing data and project management, integrating workflow automation, and real-time compliance reporting. Moreover, Onspring allows them to automate nearly anything Northgate Resorts may need in perpetuity.
Savings with Onspring
Challenge
Since each campground is highly amenitized with activities, cabins and waterparks, Northgate saw that increased activity led to a surge in compliance items, licenses, and reporting requirements, including environmental reporting, such as water and septic regulations.
Initially, these items were managed manually, using an old database and Excel reports. And once reports were created, the ESG program manager would input each report individually into tasks within Asana, their project management tool. This amounted to thousands of uploads within a year in addition to frontloading all workflow reminders.
Along with staff turnover, the situation posed significant challenges. The seasonal nature of the business further intensified the need for efficient task management and compliance tracking.
Solution
Northgate Resorts implemented Onspring software to address these challenges to connect and automate risk management, license management, compliance, and assurance. And the benefits of efficiency, consistency, visibility, risk mitigation, and compliance monitoring began almost immediately.
1. Collaborative API project management integration with Asana
The biggest and most impactful automation with Onspring was to meticulously design and streamline the process of setting deadlines with Asana. This solution pre-formatted deadlines to automatically create, send, and assign tasks to the responsible individuals and any other staff members involved in tracking the process.
The system also had the capability to auto-assign tasks to specific roles within Northgate’s Operations and Legal departments and included a review process for monitoring task progress and completion. This was particularly beneficial for the company’s seasonality when there are time constraints and a need to prepare for thousands of guests within a short window.
Onspring’s API is designed with adaptability in mind, catering to any type of task that may emerge in the future. This feature ensures flexibility to meet evolving business needs.
2. Streamlined licensing tracking
The licenses app was the first Onspring app the team built on the platform. “We see the benefit every single day,” says Northgate Resorts ESG Program Manager Dominque Maingot.
In people-powered fashion, Maingot created a template for how the licenses should be completed, which tracks permits to operate, health department licenses, expiration dates, local regulations, and other necessary details.
After establishing the template, the next step involved assigning ownership to ensure the required information was completed. Northgate Resorts identified three pivotal staff roles—both inside and outside of their headquarters—integral to the licensing process:
- Regional Operation Managers: Overseeing the operations of multiple resorts, these managers act as liaisons between the home office and park management.
- General Managers: Positioned at the ground level, these individuals lead each park and maintain a nuanced understanding of their respective licenses.
- Legal Department: Tasked with reviewing and tracking licenses from the home office nationwide.
The Onspring configuration strategically aligned data points so that Onspring and Asana know each park, each individual licensing task, and each task owner. The API initiates the creation of the main task and automatically includes those three collaborators at the outset. Once they get an alert, they still have the flexibility to add a pool manager to the pool license. While retaining the flexibility to add contributors—say, a pool manager for the pool license—the internal workflow efficiently navigates the application process in Onspring, culminating in task closure.
The API sweeps nightly to check for any license expiration dates. Currently, the proactive, custom trigger is set to alert at 90 days, allowing the team enough time to get the license renewed ahead of schedule. This has been a game-changer. “For example,” says Maingot, “One of our California parks has over 80 individual licenses. So, when they all hit, it used to be overwhelming.” Now, nothing falls through the cracks.
3. Consistent environmental compliance
As an integral part of its environmental compliance efforts, Northgate Resorts is required to conduct routine water testing and submit reports to the state based on specific parameters and operating dates. The team utilizes the Onspring controls app to manage critical environmental compliance reports, activity records, documentation, and much more. Quick dashboard filtering functionality makes reporting on environmental controls specific to an area, like California and its associated fuel sales reporting easy.
Expanding their use of Onspring, the legal team now uses the platform for managing contracts and vendor relationships across over 200 different jurisdictions, ranging from local municipalities to federal agencies. This comprehensive approach aligns with Onspring’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management capabilities, offering the team a centralized platform to streamline their legal and compliance operations while promoting transparency and efficiency within the organization.
Compliance Management in Onspring
See how automation can save 25% of your time when automating assessments and reporting.
Result
Northgate Resorts experiences and measures the benefits of Onspring automation through delegation, accountability, and compliance. This strategic approach elevates operational efficiency and positions Northgate for sustained growth.
“One of the most significant time-saving measures we implemented with Onspring came from the API integration with Asana,” says Maingot, highlighting the substantial impact. “This integration resulted in an annual time saving of over 200 hours in project management alone.”
At a granular level, the API significantly reduced the time spent on previously manual efforts, such as task creation, ownership assignments, task communications and document sharing in Asana, saving approximately 15 minutes per license renewal.
Additionally, Northgate introduced another Onspring integration with their HR platform, which has also yielded a similar time saving of close to 200 hours. Over the course of five years, the team anticipates exceeding $136,000 in savings from these two integrations alone.
According to Maingot, “Our executive team really values the transparency that Onspring brings to our company. We are able to share a lot of data very efficiently and collaborate very well overall as a company.”
Future Outlook
Northgate Resorts plans to expand its use of Onspring, particularly in an aquatics management build-out and acquisitions modules as the company continues to grow. This expansion underscores Northgate Resorts’ commitment to staying at the forefront of innovative solutions, ensuring the seamless integration of these modules as key pillars in their evolving operational framework.
Having successfully navigated compliance and operational challenges with Onspring’s automation capabilities, Northgate Resorts is poised to further optimize its operations, providing a solid foundation for continued success and an elevated guest experience in the hospitality and resort industry.
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