The Edith Macy Conference Center is not your average property; opened in 1982, the Westchester County, NY-based Center is owned by the Girl Scouts of the USA and managed by Benchmark Hospitality. While typical of many smaller operations in its needs for automated help, the energy and focus the staff brought to bear on updating their systems earlier this year raise it above the crowd.

With 60 guestrooms (14 of which are lodge-style) and 8,000 sq ft of function space, about two-thirds of the Center's business comes from Girl Scouts' continuing education courses, the balance being mostly corporate and non-profit events. As a result, their clients' rooming lists have a heavy emphasis on multiple-occupancy rooming, and any system managing the operation needs to be very flexible in setting and changing shares on the fly, all while tracking guests' gender.

"As you can imagine," says Dave Vogt, General Manager, "we needed a great deal of flexibility in the systems we were looking at to replace the old proprietary PMS/S&C application when we took over the property earlier this year. While the initial push to upgrade came from Y2K issues, we also knew we needed to capture much more detail on our clients to be more competitive in our future marketing, so we wanted comprehensive, modern systems. And given that we had a lot to tackle, we decided to install the new systems virtually one after the other."

The good thing about this is that both products selected - Northwind's Maestro PMS (sold through MCorp) and Daylight's new enterprise S&C system - share a common Windows NT-based, LAN environment, so there were no hardware conflicts involved. The challenge is that both are very full-featured, and while their screens are certainly easy to get around, there's a lot to learn about each.

"Considering that we were introducing many of the staff to Windows and a mouse for the first time, as well as asking them to change from an existing system to two new applications at once - oh, yes, and also replacing the financial/accounting and call accounting systems as well! - we knew that retention from the initial training was not going to be great," says Vogt.

"So we provided basic Windows/mouse experience before we started, kept the initial systems training to the basics, and arranged with the vendors for refresher courses a month or two after the cut-over, when people had had time to get used to the new environment. We certainly asked for a lot from the staff, but they came through for us really well. The systems are both proving highly satisfactory, and morale is high."

Sounds like they all deserve Merit Badges for Planning and Dedication.

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