IDS FortuneNEXT Enterprise: helping hotels smile their way to profitability

For hotels and hospitality enterprises that work around the clock, on-call tech support is as important as the business automation/ technology solution.

Airways Hotel discovered the advantages of a 24x7 support service with their new property management solution. And now they smile all the way to the bank!

Picture perfect… almost

The Airways Hotel, a 25 year-old hotel in Papua New Guinea is part of a reputed hospitality chain in the Pacific; and a business leader in industry trends. A winner of accolades at the World Travel Awards 2010, its uniqueness has made it Papua New Guinea’s leading hotel and the World’s leading Airport Hotel for the year 2010. Located near Jacksons International Airport in Port Moresby, it overlooks the Bootless Bay and the Owen Stanley Range.

The hotel successfully deployed a technology solution to automate their operations, soon began to see glitches in their solution, which started to impact the seamless operations at the hotel.

The management faced problems with the service provider as they had limited access to technology support since they were not a large subscriber at the time. The Airways hotel also grappled with issues like the vendor interface problems and stalled night audits affecting their operational efficiency.

Serving it on a platter/ A more comprehensive note

The Hotel evaluated alternative solutions and implemented IDS FortuneNEXT Enterprise.

The solution integrated all the hospitality functions – from front office to payroll – creating a single, centralised system of operations. It even simplified front desk management, and payroll, and inventory management.

This meant:

·        No lost interfaces, and therefore, no operational delays;

·        Inventory and payroll linked to finance and accounting, for better financial 

      calculations;

·        Smart features, such as the ialert, to allow efficient communication with guests;

·        Informative financial reports to aid decision-making.

The solution’s key modules included: Front Office Management • Point of Sale • Accounts Receivable • Sales and Marketing • Banquets • Telephone Management • Materials Management • Food and Beverages Costing • Financial Management • HR and Payroll • Maintenance Management • Quality Management • SMS Alerts

Additional features helped the Hotel stay future-ready:

·        Strong reporting and control functions;

·        Compliance with local regulatory requirements;

·        Plug-and-play interfaces for third-party products to enable seamless hotel

      automation;

·        An easy-to-maintain technical build, supporting faster updates, and greater security;

·        100% application uptime and complete scalability;

·        No unique hardware investments;

·        24x7, live, multi-lingual support, and free user training.

“The most commendable part is that IDS is open to modification should users request a feature which will enhance efficiency,” said Kevin Yaxley, Executive Director at Airways Hotel.

It all adds up to profits

The Hotel has begun to see the positive impact on key operational areas.

·       Easy and efficient handling of guest queries, quick access to guest history (such as number of visits) for relevant details, expedited check out processes, and efficient guest messaging have enhanced guest management.

·       Improved monitoring (and control) of costs with weekly F&B cost tracking, informative reports and tools to guide revenue management, and data to support financial plans have resulted in an average increase of 15% in the room rates. Revenue and cost management have never been this easy.

·    Reports on market and enterprise productivity measures, insights into the Hotel’s performance in different sectors, data to support assessments linked to critical decisions, and business intelligence to guide strategy – all these have boosted sales and marketing efforts. 

·       A document centre to give front-desk personnel easy access to information, an SMS alert engine, and a drag-and-drop check-in and check-out tool, have all enabled smart work. Implications: reduced time taken to complete tasks and gains in operational efficiency.

·    User-friendly features, touch screen versions at point of sales to post guest orders, easy communication  of guest requirements to bars and restaurants, and reports to aid menu engineering. All these have reduced errors and set the productivity curve soaring. 

IDS Softwares:   www.idsnext.com

Airways Hotel, Papua New Guinea:   www.airways.com.pg

Golf & Spa .. using Business Intelligence in Client Segmentation

 

From Gaming & Leisure Magazine - Summer 2011

gamingandleisuremagazine.com

Golf & Spa, viewed as required leisure divisions by many resorts, have traditionally been marginal contributors to the bottom line.  These departments have often required significant financial and labor commitments with a rather low rate of return on investment.  Savvy leisure managers must consistently monitor activities to ensure they’re doing what is necessary to materially enhance the resort’s revenue stream to be considered viable.  As it is with other departments at the resort, their profitability is essential.

Several Golf & Spa Management systems have been offering Business Intelligence tools (BI) that provide valuable data to assist managers in making appropriate decisions to ensure positive trends are enhanced and negative trends are corrected.  

These BI tools are designed to indicate if revenues are falling or expenses are not in-line with anticipated revenues or budgeted amounts.  The proactive manager will be able to make appropriate decisions to make corrections if enterprise data is provided in a consistent and understandable manner.  BI is of little value if the data is inaccurate or becomes available too late for action to be taken.

Along with the providing revenue statistics specific to the leisure facility, BI systems will provide information on how Golf & Spa activities drive room rates, enhance low season demand, impact F&B revenues, capture new market segments and extend a guest’s length of stay at the resort.

Successful marketing strategies driving a leisure facility’s profitability will often depend on their ability to truly understand their clients and group them according to likely behaviors and potential value.  Segmentation will be most valuable with clients are grouped according to a variety of data including behavior, lifestyle, past golf & spa treatment history, profitability, demographics, etc.

The lifetime spending of a leisure client is a valuable measure for the resort. Clients are categorized into different sets or segments based on this measure. The resort may have different strategies to keep guests happy based on their segment. The strategy would vary between a high-value client that has been a member for years and is on site several times each week versus a guest that hasn't been seen in months. Free guest passes may be a good perk for the high-value client, but free personal training sessions or golf lessons may re-engage a client who hasn't been around in a while.

The impact of BI can be traced throughout the business lifecycle, from converting guests into members, to deciding on a marketing campaign, to identifying which divisions are performing up to expectations, and to the number of spa therapists and golf caddies to be scheduled on a given day. With the reliable BI data, each leisure facility can analyze vital date for each of their fundamental key performance indicators such as Member Sales, Retail Product Sales, Greens Fees and Spa Treatment Sessions Sold.

A summary of some of the client-segmentation issues with BI include:

• Creating manageable segments with targeted activities, such as marketing campaigns.
• Identifying attributes with key requirements of each client group through integrated modeling.  Setting attributes, needs and wants of each member group based on demographic, geographic, attitudinal and behavioral data.
• Establishing triggers to track and assess a client’s migration between segments to understand how marketing strategies have affected behavior.
• Determining segment-specific actions and differentiate the characteristics between the segments.
• Gaining a unified, integrated view of clients by pulling together data from all touch points and channels into a central database.
• Generate more accurate segments by using techniques and predictive modeling analysis to fine-tune corporate metrics.
• Gauge the impact of marketing activities by monitoring member response at all points, analyzing changes in behavior.

An important feature in implementing BI among different departments and locations is the ability to develop consistency in enterprise metrics.  Inefficient business operations had commonly been ineffective in defining these metrics. Different business units had relied on different sources and methods to identify the metrics. In other cases, there would significant manual effort to derive the metrics. Yet another issue was the timeliness of data; the leisure director was not able to extract the relevant information in time to make appropriate decisions.

The ultimate goal in implementing BI effectively is to establish one universal source of current, accurate, and available information. Better information based on uniform data translates to better strategic and operational decisions, which in turn translates to a better bottom-line.