Over £150 million passes through Open Solutions’ touch screen tills each year
We deal with over 600,000 membership loyalty accounts
90% of support calls are resolved within 2 hours by our team of technical support engineers
Key management
Ed Beale, CEO
Having directed EMAP’s specialist magazines business including golf titles such as Golf Monthly, Ed joined forces with Tony Jones to specialise in business turnaround. Brought in by owner investor Simon Kimble to sort out MH Systems, their recommendation to acquire Open Solutions has triggered a new chapter of organisational development.
Ed focuses on building the company’s sales, marketing and support capabilities, ensuring customers are at the heart of the business. A keen rugby follower and enthusiastic club golfer off 9, Ed knows about the game from every angle, off as well as on the fairway...
Tony Jones, Group Operations Director
A successful entrepreneur in telecommunications and software, Tony has been a business turnaround expert for several years. His focus at Open Solutions is ensuring the software development side of the business delivers the fully effective solutions our customers want, on time and on budget.
Another keen club golfer – he and Ed are regular partners at their home club – Tony fully understands the issues every manager has to wrestle with in order to make their clubs enjoyed by members and visitors, while constantly improving their bottom line.
Team
Andrew Gale, Financial Manager
Originally from a banking and fiduciary background, Andrew’s passion is Chelsea Football Club, to the extent that he’s a fully committed season ticket holder.
At Open Solutions, Andrew looks after the numbers and makes sure our own bottom line stays in great shape, while outside the business he likes to give advice from the terraces to his and rival club managers on match winning tactics.
Les Lawrence, Sales Director
Originally an ex-professional footballer whose 16 year career in the 1st to 4th divisions topped out at Peterborough United, Les moved into sales and marketing, eventually becoming the sales director of global brands Bridgestone and Pirelli in the UK.
At Open Solutions his main expertise lies in developing long term customer relationships. Having discovered golf, Les rose to become Captain at his golf club in Lincolnshire and now plays off a very useful 9 at Handsworth GC in Birmingham.
Charles de Haan, Group Marketing Director
With a background in corporate branding and FTSE 100 annual report design, Charles now oversees Open Solutions marketing and communications.
Playing off 4 for many years at clubs like Walton Heath and now Reigate Heath, he now spends more time on his club’s marketing than out on the course, but remains confident he can still beat Ed over nine holes…
Chris Ward, Sports Products & Customer Accounts Manager
Once a talented scratch golfer, then a successful golf club secretary based in Carlisle, Chris has looked after our top end club customers for several years as their ‘go to’ contact for generating new features on our development schedule.
As someone who’s ‘seen it, done it and got the video’ when it comes to golf, Chris leads our annual user group meetings
Mark Hesketh, System Architect
Originally a high level banking software expert, Mark developed CHIPS, an EPoS system for clubs in the early 1990s that became widely acknowledged as the most reliable and capable EPoS package of its type.
Mark now focuses on developing tailored business solutions, including online tee time booking and lottery systems for some of the UK’s best known golf clubs. He also has a penchant for completing impossible crosswords before most people have finished reading them.
Melanie Oliver , Operations Manager
Melanie Oliver's using her 15 years of experience in software support to identify and action more ways in which we can improve our customer service.
Originally based in Hong Kong, Singapore and latterly the Philippines, a global hub for software support to many of the world’s top brands, Melanie’s clear about the reason for her new role: “Having been at the sharp end in senior positions in both project and account management, I see myself as someone who’s become skilled at turning all sorts of challenges into workable solutions.”
Stuart Millar, Technical Support Engineer
Our rugby technology development programme leader, Stuart’s main experience is with the EPoS systems and their related applications.
Now handling the integration of FSI’s Game Management System with our EPoS system for our rugby club customers, Stuart also trains and supports customers. Another dedicated sports enthusiast, his passion is ‘geocaching’ and telling colleagues and customers about his latest exploits up hill and down dale…
Andy Hornby, Technical Support Engineer
The UK expert on the original Open Solutions EPoS system, Andy looks after most of our northern based clubs, handling both installations, training and upgrades, along with all the related hardware.
He looks after our customers in the M6 corridor and Ireland, and is something of a hardware specialist, as there’s nothing he can’t fix, because he loves soldering stuff especially knackered tills, whenever the opportunity arises.
Brian Beckett, Technical Support Engineer
Brian has the complete working and support knowledge of our golf related software, and looks after club customers in the south and midlands.
Brian’s something of a petrolhead: he not only loves cars and doing them up, but is an off road driving enthusiast as well. Inexplicably, he’s also a fan of The Magic Roundabout…
Rob Payne, Technical Support Engineer
Rob’s expertise covers the full range of our business solutions package, from our EPoS system and everything it can do, to our apps for membership & subscriptions, handicaps & competitions, tee time booking and so on.
Rob looks after many of our southern based customers, dealing with installations, training and upgrades. He’s also a keen amateur footballer, West Ham fan, and a dedicated family man.
See what our customers say about us
" I can now get all the information I need, and that makes it far more straight forward to manage a very active, busy club with over 1,000 members. That in turn means Farnham RUFC is on a very sound footing as a business as well as a club"
" To achieve the highest possible levels of retention, keeping your members well informed is key.... additional detail such as the receipts feature is certainly reducing both calls to the office and the time it takes for us to give them the details they’re after."
" To date, we’ve not seen anything that matches this capability, and that’s got a lot to do with why we’ve kept OS for over 12 years. The simple fact is that everything works, is stable, and does what we want it to."