Situation

Jumeirah International, the Dubai based luxury hospitality group owns and operates some of the most prestigious hotels in the Middle East and Europe, including the world’s most luxurious hotel, Burj Al Arab. The group includes some of Dubai’s most recognizable and prestigious resort facilities, as well as renowned hotels in London, and the Middle East’s only degree-level academic institution specializing in the hospitality industry. The Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management

The group, which was founded in 1997, has built its reputation on customer service and high standards throughout its hotels. The group has aimed at providing a consistent level of customer service and experience for all of its hotels, and to ensure that the same standards are applied across all of the hotels, of plans, checklists and other documents detail how processes from making a bed to serving dinner should be carried out.

The structure of Jumeirah Internationals’ Quality Management System is supported at the highest level by the company Vision, which outlines the future direction of the company and the Quality Policy which outlines management commitment in achieving our objectives for quality. Both in turn are supported by Guiding Principles, which are the values that guide Jumeirah International colleagues through their daily activities.

Jumeirah International recognises ISO 9001 to be one of its most important operational tools in achieving the highest standards of service that have become the benchmark of Jumeirah International properties. The management team has embraced the ISO system to ensure the delivery of these high standards to all of its guests on a daily basis

In addition to the ISO certification for its hotels, Jumeirah International has received the Dubai Quality Award for several of its properties including Burj Al Arab, The Jumeirah Beach Hotel, The Jumeirah Beach Club Resort and Spa and Wild Wadi Water Park.

Managing these documents, including updates, amendments, approvals and alerting colleagues to changes is a daunting task. With over 10,000 staff employed in the group, providing the correct documents in paper form, required a significant administrative task

Solution

As part of a wider remit to streamline internal processes and maintain high productivity, the IT community at Jumeirah International realized that the documentation process was ripe for rationalization. They decided that the best solution to the problem would be to publish the documents online, using an intranet to host the information. This would automatically reduce the volume of paperwork involved, and would also offer Jumeirah International the potential to introduce document management and workflow solutions that could create further benefits.

A steering committee formally launched the project, named Mercury, and after assessing a number of options, decided upon a solution based on Microsoft technologies, from local Microsoft partner Frequency. For the intranet, Jumeirah International is using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft’s leading enterprise portal solution. With SharePoint, Jumeirah International was able to design and deploy a portal that can scale to include all 10,000 employees, with content that can be customized for individuals to provide them with the appropriate information for their role. The solution will also provide updates for specific groups of employees as required, while close integration with Microsoft Exchange enables automatic email alerts to be sent to employees when there is something on the intranet that requires their attention.

The portal platform provides an easy means of access to Jumeirah International’s documents for colleagues, but to control the process of document management, the group is also using Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft software partner TeamPlate BPM Suite. RMS is an XML-based solution, which is compatible with Microsoft Office System and other leading applications, that defines user access to specific documents and sets the actions that the user has with each document. User rights can be set with RMS, which then controls whether a user can edit a document, print it, or only view it. Because the RMS usage policy is set for the document, the content protection is persistent to safeguard from unauthorized use.

When integrated with TeamPlate BPM workflow solution, the Intranet portal provides a complete system to automate the process of adding a new document, editing it, getting it approved and alerting the relevant employees of changes to the document, while ensuring that the documents are kept secure and can only be accessed by the relevant person.

Benefits

Mercury has created significant time and cost savings for Jumeirah International, according to Joe Tesfai, Group Director of Information Technology. Automation of document processes has freed up resources, and makes the whole process much faster than it was before.

"We have brought down the The approval process for new documentso a few days,” he explained. “Through the integration with Exchange, if a document is updated, then the person responsible for approving it is automatically emailed, and a task is created in Outlook for them to approve the document. If the document is not approved, then the process is automatically escalated, while we can even set up auto-notification so that we can see who is working on the document at any point and follow the process throughout - it is much quicker."

The first phase of the project, which includes the portal and hosting of all of the group’s standard operations documents was carried out by Jumeirah International’s in-house developers, with support from Frequency and Microsoft, and took only six months to complete.

"We were very impressed by the speed with which this solution could be implemented, it was very quick," said Tesfai.

The portal is currently available throughout over 2,000 desktops across Jumeirah International to connect the 10,000 colleagues, while the solution has the scalability and flexibility to expand with the group, and can be rolled out to anywhere in the world in line with the group’s global expansion plans. Getting staff trained on the portal has also been very straightforward, according to Tesfai, as the system uses a familiar Microsoft Office-style interface which the staff are comfortable using.

In the second phase, Jumeirah International is planning on expanding the capabilities of Mercury using several additional Microsoft applications. Content Manager Server (CMS) will enable individual teams within the group to develop their own sites to match with their specific business roles. Content can be selected from a global repository by the teams, who will also be able to manage the sites themselves.

The group also aims to standardize thousands of its internal forms, and to bring these into the portal using Microsoft Infopath 2003. With Infopath, forms such as vacation requests can be created in digital formats, with the data captured automatically. The forms can then be integrated with other XML-enabled applications to create automated processes for approvals, scheduling, updating database information and so on.

"We have forms along with our operational documents, so we have started the process of rationalizing these, to make them standard across the group and make processes easier. The whole aim of the Mercury project is to streamline our processes and increase productivity and communications, and we are very pleased with what we have achieved so far," Tesfai said.

Note to Editors

Jumeirah International properties are regarded as among the most luxurious and innovative in the world and have won numerous international travel and tourism awards. The Dubai based luxury hospitality group encompasses the world renowned Burj Al Arab, the world’s most luxurious hotel, the multi-award winning Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Emirates Towers Hotel, Offices and Boulevard, The Jumeirah Beach Club Resort and Spa, Madinat Jumeirah, The Arabian Resort – Dubai, and Bab Al Shams Desert Resort & Spa.

The group's activities are however, not restricted to hotel and resort management. The Jumeirah International portfolio also includes Wild Wadi, regarded as one of the premier water parks outside of North America and The Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management, the region’s only third level academic institution specialising in the hospitality and tourism sectors.

Jumeirah International has also expanded internationally and manages The Carlton Tower and The Lowndes Hotel in London’s Belgravia.

Building on this success, Jumeirah International has become a member of Dubai Holding, a collection of leading Dubai based businesses and projects, in a step that aims to initiate a new phase of growth and development for the group.