"You can never have enough communication, especially on a complex project," advises Jeremy Rock, President of the RockIT Group, a hotel technology consulting firm in California. "It's imperative that the vendor understands the client's objectives and how they operate their business," he says. "In addition, the client has to know not only whether the system they're about to install is capable of performing the functionality they're seeking, but also how this functionality works."

"For instance, take a recent installation of PMS and POS systems at two sister hotels located next to each other. Being under the same ownership, they wanted their guests to be able to use either hotels restaurants and facilities and post charges back to their own hotels folio. Although the systems selected could do this, the posting codes needed to be set up properly to accommodate it."

"When the vendor sold the system’s functionality to the hotel owners, though, the exact method of implementation was never discussed. As a result, the hotel operations staff never thought to ask the vendor if cross-charging had any special requirements. And although this configuration had been installed before at other properties, only a few people from the vendor were familiar with it, and so the vendor's installation coordinator never brought up the issue. To complicate matters further, since one hotel was an existing operation, its systems were installed before the other, which was under construction."

"In order to have the internal operations reports returned on a similar basis, the new hotel was configured with transaction charge codes identical to those of its sister hotel. Sound logical? Yes, but that's not the way cross-charging worked; the codes had to be different, since there was no other way for the systems to determine which hotel the charge had come from."

"The problem was discovered only a few days before the new hotel’s opening, when it was too late to reconfigure the database. In the regular last minute chaos normally associated with opening a hotel, the decision was made to leave the database as it was and proceed with the opening - which meant losing one of the main features the systems had been selected for. To date this functionality is still being done on a manual basis and given that it will require a major reconfiguration of the database, loss of guest history, etc, it's unlikely to be changed in the near future."

"The lesson here is that there can never be too much preparation for a major system installation. In this particular case, both parties were guilty of taking things for granted. Always run through how the critical functions you've identified will be performed, even if it seems obvious. You never know what false assumptions you might uncover."

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