Consisting of several departments working in concert, the hospitality industry works towards a singular goal of offering the best experience to their guests. A cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) such as SAP S/4HANA is a great fit for the hospitality industry, as it ensures every individual component is functioning at optimum capacity, by handling the day-to-day transactions in every department. Further, an intelligent ERP can empower the workforce with actionable insights in real-time. With changing demands and expectations, the hospitality industry needs to evolve, and provide an improved guest experience.
Why consider an ERP
Guest History
Retaining customers is critical. SAP S/4HANA helps in maintaining an integrated view of regular customers with added options to save, change, organise, and alter all your guest data. This information is saved securely over the cloud servers, thereby helping you serve your customers better round the clock. Updating customer profiles in real-time allows the organization insight into their preferences and choices, expanding with every interaction.
Room Booking
Hotels and resorts can now track current reservations using a cloud based ERP. In addition, the system uses various metrics to plan for future occupancy trends. It automatically sends a confirmation, when a booking is made through the system. The highlight is that SAP S/4HANA is holistic. No extra software is required for other tasks as this streamlines the room booking process allowing personnel to personnel manage through the software.
Supervision
An ERP system can enable real-time viewing and monitoring of complete processes from a single workstation. For example, a range of tasks from kitchen orders & their service, status of room service, to customer checkouts can be tracked through the software with ease. This will further allow the management to plan and coordinate the future course of action.
Managing departments
The system can be used to create a central database to demonstrate buying, selling, and consumption patterns and trends. This can be analyzed for unusual patterns to get ahead of pitfalls. Personnel can also track both internal and external users, vendors, consumables, order management, and complete audit reports. This resolves challenges hospitality managers face across varied departments such as purchasing, HR, inventory, and finance.
Easy Maintenance
With a central system like SAP S/4HANA in place, managing housekeeping, laundry, and maintenance becomes very simple. A customized calendar and schedule allows the management to track and assign which rooms are ready for check-in and which need cleaning. This can also be used to create and customize laundry schedules for either internal or third-party services while allowing guest laundry services to be linked to their invoice. Maintenance schedules can be created and updated in real-time to show day-to-day tasks and if any repairs are needed.
Front desk efficiency
By enabling task management and allocation from a single source, the ERP software increases the efficiency of the front-desk system. This reduces the amount of time required for check-in and check-out especially when offering discounts, group rates, bill forwards, or room changes. This efficiency positively impacts the other front-desk services, such as wake up calls, special requests, housekeeping, and maintenance needs.
Reduced time cycles and increased productivity
SAP S/4HANA provides real-time updates that allow managing and coordinating various tasks to run your hotel/resort seamlessly. This ranges from room availability, check-ins and checkouts, charges calculation, delivery options, and more. Moreover, to offer your customers the best possible experience, the ERP system allows menu card listings and prices to be managed by the administration.
Visibility issues arise from managing data across isolated silos. Relevant data is often present across disparate platforms, making it very labour intensive and time-consuming to compile all of it. Additionally, unique metrics, data structures, and processes for each system make interpretation tough. An ERP software is targeted at increasing productivity. This means it has been designed to circumvent common pain points by providing an integrated system that allows administrators to manage tasks and follow up from a single screen, without compromising on the customer experience.
As an SAP Gold Partner, we have worked closely with different hospitality providers. Understanding how your organization works, we come up with an SAP S/4HANA conversion roadmap that aligns with your business outcomes and improves the guest experience. Please feel free to reach out to one of our experts to further explore the business value that you can create with SAP S/4HANA.
