By: Sophie Talbot
Like a lot of my MICROS colleagues my background is in the hotel industry. My last job before I took the big jump to technology was as a revenue manager in a central London hotel. I often find myself thinking back to those days, particularly when I look at the growing range of new tools, technology and services we are developing at MICROS.
My personal favorite at the moment – (I know I sound like a very fickle girl!) has to be our OPERA business intelligence tool, or OBI as we acronym obsessed folks like to call it. OBI was developed specifically for the hospitality industry as part of our OPERA Suite of products, to provide hoteliers with graphical, easy to use actionable data in order to make more informed decisions, increase brand loyalty and maximize revenue.
OBI runs on a separate application and database that is linked to OPERA, and uses cubed data built directly from OPERA that is gathered with hotel key performance indicators in mind (Cubes allow OPERA to give users the ability to analyze data organized by more than one dimension – so instead of a spreadsheet format of sorting revenue by date, you can analyze by date, city, period, product, revenue and against budget or forecast!)
When I look at some of our standard reports that come with OBI I am immediately reminded of the time I used to spend analyzing historical data – how did we do yesterday against the same time last year and how would we do in the next month, three months, year??
I was often left with a nasty case of ‘too little too late’. I could often see retrospectively how not having that key group, or how a specific company’s drop in reservations had affected us, unfortunately it was too late to do anything about it. With the wide range of pace reporting available in OBI you can see in advance how you are doing against, forecast, budget and the same day this time last year. This allows hoteliers to actually do something about the variance before the day in question avoiding the too little too late sinking feeling.
In addition, to pace reporting I was responsible for compiling the rooms and conference budget for the next year. As we were measured on how accurately we performed against budget I spent a long time trying to get it right. I looked at how we could increase revenue by adjusting market mix, occupancy increases, etc. In order to do this I built myself a complex spreadsheet then manually pumped in data until I got what I thought was a realistic budget with a reasonably aggressive, achievable increase in top line. It took me 3 weeks to do that!…
Now every time I look at our ‘What if’ report that comes standard in the OPERA BI package I am reminded of my own personal spreadsheet hell and how we can save someone else from going through it!
Needless to say my beautiful accurate budget was sent to HQ who immediately raised it by 5% across the board anyway.
Next time you are in your own personal spreadsheet hell – pick up the phone and give us a call. OPERA BI might be the light at the end of your tunnel.
Find out more about what MICROS can do for you! For more information contact us at info@micros.com Phone: 866.287.4736 (US and Canada)
