If Prism Hospitality Consulting had generated hospitality information technology word clouds related to all our professional discussions, proposals, and assignments for each quarter trailing back to, say, 2015 we’d have seen a recurring theme of top words, terms or acronyms related to what might be described as the bright shiny object of the day. This includes earlier buzzwords like blockchain, the internet of things (IoT), attribute-based selling, cloud, touchless, plus a more recent tsunami of references and claims related to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Each of these initiatives would have grabbed that top word spot throughout the peak of its buzz period, then faded into the background. However, right now there’s currently a long-time background word has been sneaking into the word cloud top spot, and that is the acronym ERP. Taking a wild guess, it might be reasonable to estimate less than 20 percent of our colleagues in the hospitality industry would know what ERP stands for, let alone what an ERP really is. Despite this, there appears to be a current surge of hospitality companies looking to implement, extend, or replace their enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies.
You might think of ERP in terms of an accounting and finance tool, and certainly it can be deployed for just accounting and finance purposes. But it can also support a significantly broader scope of business functions. Depending on the field in question an ERP will comprise select modules and functions that other business types may have no need of. By way of example: The logistics industry might incorporate speciality modules for supply chain, warehouse, and transportation functions. Engineering and manufacturing might need product management, component management, and production routing.
The hospitality sector would require, purchase order and inventory capabilities attuned to food and beverage purchasing (factors like catch weights, menu item ingredient calculations, etc.). We might also need time and attendance functions that support variable pay rates, multiple positions per employee, and address the unique overtime regulations common in hotels.
Below let’s look at all the modules and functions that in part – or in whole – constitute a hospitality ERP solution. Keep in mind that these are a collective of modules and applications and rarely all come from a single vendor partner.
The hotel industry is well served by many ERP solution providers, each often serving a slice of the ERP pie. Most notably we have several hospitality-dedicated stalwarts that you can find within these pages, including Aptech, M3, My Digital Office, Data Plus Hospitality Solutions, and a slew of newer companies. Unifocus offers hospitality-specific time and attendance and labor standards applications. The big-name ERP vendors are invariably cross-industry players. They include Infor, Oracle, Sage, Epicor, Workday, and others. Because they supply scores of different industries they generally partner with many different value-added resellers (VARs) who specialize in specific industries. For example, Professional Accounting Solutions (PAS) is a hospitality specialist that deploys Infor’s SUN Financials. Acumen and TBSP are skilled implementers of the Sage Intacct platform.
Hospitality ERP VARs will have deep understanding of our industry’s USALI accounting practices and hospitality industry business models and structures. You won’t need to explain terms like revenue per available room (RevPAR) or Big Four to a hospitality specialist, but you might to a random implementor. So choosing an implementation partner is as important as the selecting the actual system.
When properly conducted and implemented, enterprise resource planning will help leverage your ability to adapt and align your hospitality business processes to both predictable and unpredictable market conditions. You’ll be better equipped to control costs, identify new business practice opportunities, generate more accurate forecasts, and better measure, manage, and report results more effectively and efficiently.
Perhaps the very unpredictable travel and hospitality market conditions we have experienced over the last several years are the catalyst for ERP having elbowed its way to the front of our word cloud.
