The general feeling is that the exercise is a laborious one and that it requires extensive training. Ankerdata, which supplies hotel management solutions to the hospitality industry, has recently installed its property management system, protel, within The Capital Group's portfolio, based in Sandton.
According to Ian Lumsden, GM of Ankerdata, one would be surprised at just how many outdated, unproductive hotel management systems there are out there, and migrating to a modern system is not only relatively simple, but is not a time-consuming exercise at all. Lumsden said: "Typically an installation will take approximately two weeks, depending on the size of the hotel, with training done as a dual task, taking up the lion's share of five days, which is coupled with nightly implementation, before system handover and signoff."
Working with hotel owners, revenue managers and operational heads via a series of workshops enables the protel team to establish exactly what the client is looking for. "We are able to customise some of the system tools with our team of developers and programmers locally and in Germany, enabling us to offer specific reporting options and, as was the case with The Capital Hotel Group, to split up the suites that are sold as two- or three- bedroomed units, as separate rooms, to market," said Eben Marais, National Operations Manager of Ankerdata. This is probably the longest process, taking up to three months depending on the urgency and scope of the new features. Their system was able to go live across all six properties simultaneously, significantly simplifying and improving operations.
Although it is always frustrating to learn new systems, the conversion should be a no-brainer because of the long-term benefits: improved data management, added insights and guest profiling, quick reporting and, more importantly, the ability to access all your properties via the cloud MPE (Multi Property System) remotely.
The single database technology proves superior to any other on the reporting tools; owners can choose to see all the statistical information on a single property or on combined properties (MPE). Financial reports can be viewed accumulatively or individually and all reports are enabled to export to Microsoft Excel. protel also supplies an SPE (Single Property Edition), which encompasses all the functionality of the MPE, but is suited for a single property and can be hosted locally.
