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| Business Information |
Daily financial information with greatly increased accuracy plus enormous reductions in effort and manpower.
Improved Business Information
Greatly improving business efficiency and giving enormous savings in time, this large-scale solution has delivered significant operational and financial benefits and is now central to the administration and management accounting efforts of this large hotel and leisure clubs group.
A complex problem
Previously, key financial information was reported weekly to Central Office in a lumbering manual process that involved transcription from a range of sources into a legacy system, resulting in imprecise data that generated many queries and reduced confidence in the figures.
Fast and effective
KB Logic developed a rapid and powerful solution that automatically captures source information for local managers to revue and clean, matches values across the organisation and enables Central Office to post accounts, review KPI's and take appropriate action.
"I use the new system twice weekly and find it far less time consuming than the old one. Also it makes you balance it correctly, which is good. All the hotels like it because there's no re-keying or duplication of effort and we get on very well with KB Logic. Whenever there's a query they always own it and respond in a helpful manner."
- Katharine Naylor - Cashier, De Vere Group.
Details:
Improved Business Information
De Vere Hotels owns and operates 40-50 hotels and 15 health & fitness clubs, and this large-scale solution, which is central to their administration and management accounting efforts, improved efficiency and gave enormous savings in time.
The Problems
Key financial information relating to revenue, expenditure, banking, credit card payments, accommodation statistics and debtors was manually compiled from many sources then transcribed into a legacy system for Central Office reporting each week.
The massive and slow manual effort involved often led to transcription errors and caused a delay in receipt of information at Central Office. Also, because of mapping irregularities between source systems and central office, the data was frequently imprecise, resulting in further delays while queries were resolved.
The fact that values stored in individual hotel's spreadsheets could not be matched with values from Central Office reduced confidence in the figures. Also, the inability to report centrally on values and statistics at the daily level, or to post financial information into a multi-company General Ledger seriously compromised efficiency.
Each hotel also maintained its own set of Excel spreadsheets that enabled them to manage financial information at the un-aggregated/detail level, which was more suited to their needs, and so additional work was required at site to feed and maintain these.
On top of this, Financial Controllers at hotels were developing independent solutions to handle their information, leading to a diverse spread of solutions across the estate that could be both incoherent and difficult to manage.
The Requirement
KB Logic was asked to help change finance users from manual data input to reviewing / cleaning data and posting journal adjustments, and to help Central Office users control mappings, report on irregularities and make rapid postings to the General Ledger.
Users wanted all activities implemented in Excel for cut-copy-paste functionality into their other financial management spreadsheets.
Furthermore, we were asked to develop automatic interfaces for Revenue and Banking to the MICROS Fidelio PMS and Trintech credit card source systems, implement a comprehensive mapping solution to relate all information held at the hotel level to information held at the central level, and provide cube-based reporting on Key Performance Indicators.
The Solution
The application extracts financial information from MICROS Fidelio systems at the hotels, enabling staff to review and ‘clean' it with MS-Excel based spreadsheets before submitting it to Central Office.
Cleaned information is presented on a weekly basis to the Company's CODA Accounts system to form part of the statutory accounts. The system also provides a data warehouse for key performance indicators as well as financial information, and enables hotel staff to report on data at a detailed level.
To provide the backbone Extract Transform Load services, we developed a number of automated data capture tools in .NET, which often used data captured from source systems in the form of reports-as-text files.
We also provided a series of Excel spreadsheets that enabled Financial Controllers to review information, monitor exceptions, post journals and report on Key Performance Indicators using cube-based OLAP reporting within Pivot Tables.
In addition, we provided an administrator's control application so that System Administrators were able to review the posting status for all hotels, manage exceptions and manage data-mappings.
Data is stored in a MS-SQL Server 2000 database and all functionality is delivered through a Citrix/Terminal Services interface.
The Benefits
The solution has now been in operation for almost 5 years and De Vere Hotels has benefited from significantly increased accuracy of data, coupled with a dramatic reduction in effort required to resolve questionable data, and an enormous overall saving in effort and man-hours. Executive and management staff now receive financial information on a daily basis with minimal delay. |
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