As you make your budgets and update your forecasts, you are probably considering current hospitality OCC and ADR predictions, economic outlook, and past performance at your hotels. It’s a mixed bag with continued pent-up travel demand and possible recession headwinds. If you are looking for strategies to make the most of the opportunities, there is nothing more powerful you could do for your hotel business than consolidate your various systems of record, engagement, and intelligence onto a single back-office platform.
What are Systems of Record, Systems of Engagement and Systems of Intelligence?
Systems of record are the backbone of your business. They are the central repository for data. Tomasz Tunguz, RedPoint Ventures, explains best, “Systems of record are the single source of truth about a particular department or company. The ERP system is the canonical source of a company’s financial information. Systems of record are valued for their ability to generate reports and insight to the company’s management team”. At Hotel Investor Apps we call our ERP & Accounting Software a ‘single-version-of-the-truth’ because your financial and operational data lives in HIA. It is cloud-based, and changes are automatically and immediately synchronized no-matter where someone inputs data or views data.
Systems of engagement are your front-of-house programs used by employees. In the hotel industry, this includes your PMS and POS systems. It also encompasses technology that facilitates the customer journey such as mobile apps, social, and email.
Systems of intelligence leverage your data, from the system of record, with advanced business analytics to generate a higher level of understanding. For example, Hotel Investor Apps Business Intelligence blends your financial, operational, and labor data to derive intelligence which is more powerful than any analysis of the data separately.
Why would you want to consolidate your systems of record, engagement, and intelligence?
Though we are talking about three types of systems, for many hospitality management companies, there may be more than a dozen different software companies in the mix, with multiple disconnected software products per provider. To have the most complete, accurate, up-to-date system of record, the key is to integrate and automatically synchronize data from as many systems of engagement as possible.
On HIA’s ERP platform, this looks like integrated PMS and POS data, integrated payroll, time, and attendance data, plus synchronized banking data, and guest satisfaction data. Additionally, HIA ERP has a complete suite of native corporate accounting, international accounting, and construction accounting capabilities, eliminating the need for additional systems of record for different areas of the business.
Now with all your data in one place, your ERP becomes not only a system of record but also a system of engagement for your entire team. With HIA, employees can have a personalized dashboard that displays the relevant and important information for their position. Daily flash reports provide at-a-glance trends and key metrics.
In addition, with more functions within the ERP, you can eliminate clunky add-ons which cost you money. This consolidation of functionality also makes your data more consistent and accessible. For instance, in HIA there is built-in advanced budgeting & forecasting, document management, inter-company accounting, workflow, employee expense, automated bank reconciliation, fixed assets, purchase orders, and inventory management, all on one platform.
Lastly, now that your data is consolidated into a single system of record, such as HIA ERP & Accounting Suite, it can yield more powerful intelligence in your system of intelligence. The HIA Business Intelligence tools assimilate your accounting, performance, and payroll data to provide you with analysis which you can slice and dice, peel back the layers, and manipulate in countless ways to inform your business decisions, for example, automated anomaly notification based on your chosen metrics supports agile business management. HIA Business Intelligence is fully integrated with all modules of the HIA ERP and fully accessible with a single login.
When you consolidate your software systems on HIA, the only ERP designed for hospitality, your system of record also becomes your system of engagement. And your system of engagement becomes your system of intelligence. Here is how your back-office system could look with one centralized platform:
In the ever-changing, highly competitive world of hospitality, you may not be able to change the market demand or the economy, but you can take control of your data. You can make the most of what you know, to make informed, data-driven decisions. With systems that support your business’s top and bottom lines, you can exceed your revenue and profitability forecasts!
To see how HIA could supercharge your company, contact our sales team and schedule a demo now.
Jaime Goss has over a decade of marketing experience in the hospitality industry. At Hotel Investor Apps, Jaime heads up marketing initiatives including brand strategy, website design, content, email marketing, advertising and press relations.
