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SALES & CATERING SYSTEMS: Poised for Internet-Assisted Take-Off A review of what to look for in S&C systems, and future trends in these powerful tools. Things are definitely heating up in the S&C market. Powerful new systems have come into the market, existing ones have received major enhancements, and more capable database tools are speeding up analysis and reporting. And the Internet - today's universal panacea - having brought cheap, universal communications just about everywhere, is ready to provide more people with more access to these essential tools than ever before as the vendors make them Web-accessible. Add the continuing increase in the power of PCs and networks to take advantage of all this, and you have a compelling reason to take another look at the current state of the S&C market. Why buy an S&C system in the first place? To help you book more customers more profitably. The competition for customers never lets up; companies need as much data as they can acquire and analyze about their existing clients and potential new ones. It's the key to giving them that much more of an edge in attracting new business and in providing the superlative service expected nowadays to keep existing clients. And the more data you acquire and need to sort through, the better tools you need to manage it and make sense of it. Older, broad-brush market segmentation, tracked manually, may give you the fundamentals of understanding where your clients come from, but the name of the game today is Individual Attention: marketing and managing at virtually the individual client level. And to do that well, you need powerful, detailed and well-designed management applications, which, for the group and corporate business segments, means that tool called the modern Sales & Catering system. What do you find in an S&C system? Their functions typically fall into two areas:
Equally, there are many packages devoted to Sales Force Automation, especially from vendors who have not traditionally served the hospitality industry. Some smaller properties have done well using general-purpose PC-based packages such as Act! and GoldMine, or with more comprehensive offerings such as SalesLogix. At the higher end, there have been some successes from mainstream SFA vendors such as Pivotal Software and Siebel, with Delta and Marriott respectively. These provide excellent functionality for the pure sales process, but their relatively high prices, coupled with the degree of customization they need for the hospitality market, does tend to restrict their penetration. Nevertheless, just from their very presence in this market, they do tend to raise the functionality bar for other systems, particularly in the reporting area.
Specialist or Integrated-Suite? Taking a different approach are vendors who provide S&C functionality as one component of a complete, multi-functional system, which includes property management and various combinations of POS, back office accounting and other modules. In the past, these have usually taken the form of separate applications, distinct but tightly-interfaced to exchange data with each other. Significantly, however, every vendor of these products is now already offering or working on a fully integrated model, with the various operational functions using a single, common database to eliminate their interfaces altogether. It used to be that you had to choose between great functionality and ease of data transfer, but with the specialists producing more and better interfaces with other applications, and with the integrators making strong advances in their systems' S&C functionality, the two approaches have grown closer together. I expect both camps to disagree strongly! As always, each property must decide for itself which system or combination of systems provides the best solution to its own particular needs; there is no universal answer. Whatever the merits of the specialist-vs-integrated arguments - and both have their advantages - two common factors are noticeable: every single current system is Windows-based, and every vendor either has or is developing some form of an Internet-enabled feature set. The advantages of Windows are obvious by now: its ability to build easier-to-use screens pays off in faster and more effective training and better guidance on how the application operates, and it makes exchanging data with other systems much simpler. The latter is not only because Windows' design in itself makes the data exchange process simpler, but also because its widespread adoption as the environment of choice for so many vendors means that there's a greater choice of other applications available to work with.
The Internet - Leveraging the Power E-Commerce At a minimum, it's becoming essential to be able to accept e-mail inquiries and turn them into S&C system leads, automatically if possible. The habit of using the Internet as the prime reference source for information on potential meeting sites is by now firmly established; clients expect to find your property on the Web, and expect to be able to send you detailed e-mail inquiries about accommodating their functions. Direct access into your availability is not usually desirable; after all, for group bookings as for guestrooms and airline seats, the availability of space often - maybe usually - depends on how much you're willing to pay. It's much more effective for a property to respond immediately when it receives an inquiry, and to contact the client directly to work out the best options for both parties. An exception to the "no-direct-access" rule may be to give clients password-protected access to their own rooming lists and room block/event information once the sale has been closed, thus providing them with better and more direct control over their own data. This approach is also being helped along by such specialist companies as Passkey.com, working in the CVB market. There's also a growing interest in search-and-coordination services such as Plansoft's Ajenis. These allow a meeting planner to look for properties with a likely combination of facilities for a proposed event, and then maintain and track the ongoing dialog between planner and Sales Manager. Once a good match is found, further time can be saved by importing the client's profile from Ajenis directly into your S&C system. Web-based User Interfaces There are several significant advantages to providing browser-based front-ends to S&C systems. One is cheaper communications for traveling Sales Managers needing access to their home systems; going over the Internet with a Web browser is both less expensive and far simpler to support than dialing in over long-distance lines to a special communications program at Head Office. The Managers still need full S&C functionality on their laptops to be able to demonstrate property information, photos, floor plans, etc. to a client. But secure access to fully-current availability and account activity data through an encrypted Virtual Private Network over the Internet is a major simplification for everyone. Not only that, but you can set a Web-enabled S&C system to let specific Sales Managers know via e-mail the moment any of their key accounts' records are updated, a real time-saver. The second usage of a browser-based front end is to let multiple users in widespread locations access the S&C system functionality directly. One example would be in a large Corporate building where a widely-distributed admin staff needs to be able to book conference rooms and/or catering on demand, without calling one hard-to-reach coordinator. Another could be the part-time S&C staff at a smaller property; they may have a legitimate need for S&C functionality, but can't necessarily afford the installation and support costs of a dedicated system. They might, however, be able to use one installed at a central location, either at a Corporate site or directly from the vendor. It'll be interesting to see if this "Application Service Provider" approach catches on; there's a lot of interest in the concept, but it requires a very high - and so far unproven - level of system and network reliability to be practical. One challenge to the whole concept of Internet-enabled functions is to keep expectations grounded in some semblance of reality. Internet hype is a little intense right now, but keep in mind that Web clients are still limited in speed and functionality compared to normal PC operations. HTML is a pretty basic functional tool, likened by some to the state of PC programs in the 80's, and Java, while more powerful, is still quite slow in its current form. XML and further Java development will bring significant improvements, but they're not here yet. While we're waiting, though, what current browsers can do is still highly useful. Having a Website for your property is enormously important, of course, not only for general "presence" advertising but also because it can provide a lot of the more common S&C-type information that your clients might be looking for, such as function room floor plans and descriptions. This can save a lot of time for both clients and Sales Managers, but, as always, be careful no to overdo it with too many overly-complex graphics or video tours; download time still matters.
Tighter interaction with other systems Integration links can be grouped into three different areas:
More powerful reporting & data analysis Crystal Reports and, at the lower end, MS Access and even Excel can prove to be very usable tools for reporting and basic research, especially with such features as Excel's pivot-tables making it almost intuitive to look at the data in just the way you need. There's a huge variety in the reporting and analysis you can perform with these tools, but that also makes it easy to run into the "tyranny of choice": too many decisions to make! Look for a vendor who provides a good range of appropriate standard reports and an initial set of OLAP dimensions and data cubes for you to work from. One example where modern reporting approaches can make a significant difference is with BEOs. Many systems have automated the old process whereby a single document containing all information about an event - schedule, set-up configuration, menus, a/v, etc. - is distributed to all involved. But not everyone on the distribution list needs to know every time a BEO is updated; the a/v contractor, for example, doesn’t care if the menu has been changed. In fact, he probably already cuts and pastes the a/v sections of each day's BEOs into a single report that tells him what's needed when and where. Imagine the productivity gains from customizing the BEO information for each type of user, e-mailing them when the BEO is updated, and highlighting the changed fields! These modern utilities, combined with the ability to capture increasingly detailed information about your clients, make quite a difference to the accuracy and reliability of forecasts. It’s becoming easier than ever to determine both who your best customers are, and which previous clients (or turned-away prospects) are likely to be most receptive to solicitations for new business. A couple of thoughts, one hardware-related, one software. Palm devices - a number of these were seen at HITEC, operating as adjuncts to PMS and POS systems, and several vendors are looking at them for use with S&C, too. A good S&C system has the potential to function as a Personal Information Manager (it's always interesting to ask your vendor if he or she uses their own product for this), since they track contacts, to-do's and appointments in much the same way as MS Outlook. So there's no reason why Sales Managers shouldn’t use their S&C system on a Palm PC for those situations where a full laptop isn’t necessary. There's also a potential market for Convention Services Managers or Stewards to carry them on property, too, for up-to-date and convenient access to details on all current events. The size and power of the S&C systems' native database shouldn't be a deterrent - even Oracle Lite will run on a Palm-size platform - and while there are clearly some challenges to presenting usable information on small screens, the use of these ubiquitous devices can only increase. On the software side, one area that seems ripe for improvement is the whole, tedious RFP process. Once a year, when the major clients start to book space for the following year's contracts, every property has to respond under pressure to a great variety of RFPs, all looking for slightly different variations on the same information about the property and its facilities. It would save a lot of time if the S&C system could automatically analyze an incoming request, fill out the majority of the information fields from its own database and pass it to a Sales Manager for action on the price quotation section. Several hotel chains have built their own systems for this, but most of the information should already be in the S&C system, just waiting for extraction.
Unlock the Potential
==================================================================== © Jon Inge |
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Jon Inge and Associates |