Business Intelligence solutions in hospitality
Creating a great guest experience is fundamental to building long-term guest relationships. Hospitality operators need a full view of their guests to understand who they are and what their needs are likely to be. This requires integrating business intelligence (BI) into virtually every facet of their organization.
The Microsoft Business Intelligence platform offers an integrated approach to BI, allowing hospitality companies to provide their people with the precise information they need to enhance each guest's experience. This helps increase revenue and improve operational efficiencies. Microsoft BI solutions can also take advantage of the technology infrastructure in place today and the user interface that your people already use.
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Business challenge
People throughout the hospitality industry are looking for more than just static, backward-looking reports from their BI solution: They want insight to support collaborative analysis, forecasting, and decision-making so that BI can help drive better business decisions—and ultimately company performance. This requires an integrated system that provides complete and coherent information that is easily accessible to people throughout the enterprise.
However, several significant challenges exist in the hospitality industry:
| • | Hospitality companies currently run different BI applications for different departments—as many as six within a single company. |
| • | Different BI systems may be used at headquarters versus at the property level, due to franchise-owner models as well as to the industry's high level of merger and acquisition activity. |
| • | A high proportion of legacy and proprietary applications are still being used, making application interfaces and data management particular challenges. |
| • | High employee turnover levels deplete institutional memories and put a premium on applications and tools that are already familiar in order to minimize training time and costs. |
These issues make many hospitality companies cautious about investing in enterprise-wide BI solutions, despite the fact that delivering information to people in a format they can use to take action, or to make better business decisions, is critical to business success.
The Microsoft BI platform leverages platforms already in place in the industry and offers a cost-effective solution from data warehouse to end-user tools.
Solutions
Microsoft Business Intelligence offers a flexible, easy-to-use platform that brings important guest information and insight to those who need it, delivered at the desktop or on Windows-based PCs or Windows Mobile-powered devices—an environment that people are comfortable working in. Built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft BI solutions enable people in lodging, gaming, entertainment, and travel organizations to shape the guest experience without reconfiguring their enterprises.
Many of today's leading hoteliers, casinos, cruise lines, and resorts have invested heavily in a data warehouse but have yet to be able to unlock the power of the information they have on hand. With Microsoft BI, hospitality companies can derive optimal value from their current systems, while also providing a clear migration path for tomorrow's innovative operational and customer service solutions.
The Microsoft BI solution provides:
| • | Targeted information on actual performance compared to target goals, using key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) at the right time, delivered to the right person, in the right device. |
| • | Real-time views of where the business is now and where it's headed, to help employees make more informed decisions, improving both front-of-house and back-of-house operations. |
| • | Scorecards and dashboards—which are accessible on mobile devices—to allow people to analyze and manage revenue, expenses, inventory, labor scheduling, and more, in real time. These intuitive views provide people with quick insight into guest profiles and inventories, optimizing data to forecast trends, determine rates, or predict sales of food, beverages, or admission to special events. |
These BI solutions work smoothly between multiple servers, desktop applications, and employees' mobile devices, transforming enormous quantities of rapidly changing data into actionable information that helps people improve the business and allows them to ultimately improve the guest experience.
Some of the BI solutions Microsoft and its partners offer in the hospitality industry include:
| • | Purchasing systems: Inventory management is a tough job. Purchasing systems solutions help make this essential activity less painful, more efficient, and more cost effective. |
| • | Sales and catering: Integrated sales and catering systems help property managers closely track room availability, monitor sales person productivity, and maximize profitability. |
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how hospitality companies have benefited from business intelligence solutions offered by Microsoft and its partners:
Hilton Hotels
Hilton expanded the functionality of its OnQ Forecast Management System to include demand-based pricing and forecasting for group sales.
Expedia
A solution that creates scorecards and uses automated data collection saved Expedia analysts' time and effort, giving them more time to develop answers rather than crunch numbers.
Business benefits
By using the infrastructure and user interface that organizations already have in place through Windows and Microsoft Office software, Microsoft BI solutions give people actionable information in real time, allowing them to create a truly differentiated guest experience.
| • | Front-line employees gain access to real-time information
Having key information at hand can mean the difference between a dissatisfied guest and a smooth customer-service experience. Access to critical information about individual guest preferences gives your people the ability to provide targeted service, increase responsiveness, and make faster decisions. |
| • | Opportunities for ongoing guest data collection
The integrated, enterprise-wide approach to BI gives people throughout the organization the tools to collect data on PCs or mobile devices during key interactions, adding more detail to guest profiles and setting the stage for more positive interactions in the future. |
| • | Familiar applications and UI that extend BI's value
The Microsoft BI platform leverages the Microsoft Office system on the front end, so people can create reports in Microsoft Office Excel, link them to Microsoft Office PowerPoint, and easily update both reports and presentations. Providing people with the information they need in the Office system from the start lets BI reach virtually all employees and increases collaboration. |
| • | Easier integration with existing systems
Use of the Microsoft infrastructure that hospitality companies already have in place helps integrate existing systems and unlocks the vital data that they contain. |
| • | Improved behind-the-scenes capabilities
Intuitive views provided by scorecards and dashboards allow people to analyze and manage revenue, expenses, inventory, labor scheduling, and KPIs in real time. People gain greater abilities to forecast trends, determine optimal pricing, or predict sales figures. |
Overview
Technologies
