DENVER— Beyond the ubiquitous property management systems found at nearly every hotel, there is the less obvious, but decidedly more powerful realm of business intelligence, a technology that hotel operators use to, in effect, manage their property management. Now counted among those operators who know full well the power of this technology is Denver-based Sage Hospitality Resources, LLC, which has been on a better than two-year cycle of continually enhancing its management portfolio with the help of a business intelligence system. “We’ve been working with the [business intelligence]system for a little over two years now and trying to get it to specifically fit our hotel’s business and also Sage itself and how we work in the business,” said Brian Treadwell, Sage’s financial asset manager. “Our work is definitely a lot different now than it was before we had the system. But it’s a learning process and a process in general. You can’t expect to purchase a business intelligence system and immediately fully implement it. There’s definitely a learning curve and we’ve learned a lot along the way. There have been more positives than negatives. “We went from an Excel-based system to an online tool,” he continued. “And we would all agree there are still things we want to get done with the system and continue to improve and that’s key for our future. We’ve made an investment in a very powerful tool and it continues to make us better.” That tool, which was deployed in May of 2005, is Aptech Computer Systems’ Execuvue Cognos-based business intelligence system. In implementing it, Sage hoped to upgrade its corporate information systems by consolidating all of its operating, accounting and guest data in a single centralized business intelligence software database for instant management access to operating information. But now, as Treadwell noted, Sage is pushing beyond that initial purpose and trying to take its use of business intelligence to another level. “The first software iteration was Cognos 7, but in the beginning of this year we upgraded to Cognos 8 and we’re making constant changes to the system,” he said. “With the system we initially concentrated on the planning side, budgeting and forecasting. More recently, we’ve been concentrating on reporting and scorecarding and dashboarding.” Treadwell also noted that in the future he’d like to further integrate Sage hotels’ many PMS systems, which vary by brand typically, and its customer relationship management systems with the company’s business intelligence system. “We’re starting to address PMS. It’s something we want to do in the future, but we have seven to nine different PMS systems at our properties, so that’s a lot of different interfaces and mapping,” he noted. “As it stands now, the properties export their info and we enter it into our business intelligence system on a daily basis. And CRM could be another area. Anything we can get data for and save, really. If you can get it saved somewhere and integrate it, you can report off of it.” That wasn’t always the case for Sage. Before Aptech’s Cognos, it utilized several separate systems for such things as accounting or guest services that would generate information that had to be manually entered into Excel. The time-consuming and labor-intensive manual process would also only yield information for managers at the end of each month. But now, Sage can use its business intelligence technology to provide operating information from all 47 managed properties and all departments down to the account line level. In addition, the system includes Aptech’s Targetvue. In conjunction with Execuvue, this program acts as a budgeting and forecasting tool that automates ‘what-if’ analysis and creates reports for property owners and the managers. With varying levels of access to these business intelligence tools are 250 Sage employees, including 20 to 25 at the corporate level, Treadwell said. Among that group are the property manager
