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When Ginger Hotels embarked on a value model, everything had to be cost optimized. IT had to look at Ginger not as a hotel but as a process oriented enterprise. Heres how they did it.
INTERVIEW
The Cochin Port Trust implemented the first of its kind in India ERP to streamline and speed up its customer related and internal processes. N Ramachandran, IPS, Chairman, Cochin Port Trust talks about some of the benefits the ERP has accrued.
ITGINGER HOTELS
AccelerATes GroWTH For
When Ginger Hotels embarked on a value model, everything had to be cost optimized. IT had to look at
usiness hotels are supposed to ooze luxury, posh service and of course, large bills. Ginger Hotels, a Tata group hotel chain adopts a rather unconventional business model and is unlike the stereotypical business hotel. Ginger emulates the way businesses think and operate the focus is on costs, value for money and keeping aside frills. Therein lies the essence of Gingers value proposition to its customers.
At the early stage of concept design we realized that business-IT alignment would be paramount for us to make Ginger scalable.
Prabhat Pani, CEO, Ginger Hotels
IT was required to support accelerated growth as the chain grew from a single hotel in Bangalore to now 26 across the country. On the other hand, keeping things lean and cost efficient was equally important. Off beat business models call for off beat IT models and thats what Ginger has implemented. While the traditional approach to IT is to solve business problems, in Gingers case, he had to understand the business model and preempt scenarios that would require ITs intervention. In a manner of speaking, problems were solved even before they arose. The resulting architecture is very different from the rest of the hotel industry. By doing this, Ginger has ensured that there is standardization across all its hotels, which helps in streamlining proceses and can also deliver uniform customer experience.
eNTerPrIse INFrAsTrucTure
AT GINGer
IT plays a crucial role at Ginger Hotels owing to the focus on cost optimization while not compromising customer service. Infrastructure consists of compute and storage in a hosted datacenter. Individual hotels connect to the applications through VPN on desktops. PMs (Property Management system) and other applications like accounting, run off a sAP backend, and all applications are tightly integrated and can talk to each other. Various processes revolving around guest servicing are automated like auto provisioning of Wi-Fi upon check-in. The model adopted allows for supporting new properties, while only capacity may need to be scaled.
our architecture enables rapid deployment and standardization across all our hotels
shivdas T, Head - Information Systems & Technology
Centrally managing the operations of each hotel eliminates the need for various senior functional heads in each locations. For instance, we dont need to have seperate finance, purchase, or HR teams since all such functions are managed centrally. Since the corporate office can see in real time every event that takes place, tasks such as finance, material procurement, employee record keeping, etc, is done centrally rather than on each location. This makes it easy for Ginger to grow their business, since all they have to do is put in a few PCs and hire a skeletal staff when they open a new hotel. The manner in which the enterprise architecture is designed takes care of the rest. Since technology is behind almost every area of operations at Ginger and is closely aligned to business, Shivdas says, half in jest, that theres such a tremendous trust factor with IT that the first door people knock on when they are faced with a problem is ITs even for those problems that are isolated from IT! On a more serious note, Shivdas has a word of advice for his peers in IT: the tighter the business-IT alignment, the more important it is to pay attention to expectation management. Reflecting on this, Prabhat Pani says the well thought mohit agarwal through investment of a feature rich IT system which consisted of ERP VP & linked Carnation Auto India (SAP) CIo, to the Property Manage-
ment System (PMS), in turn integrated to the Internet Booking engine (IBE) has really paid off.
valid for the exact duration of the stay all seamless and handled centrally. Traditionally, the guest would be issued a separate card for Wi-Fi access and an administrator would have to manually provision the access for each guest at each site. Sure, some of these value-adds are cool, but Ginger is not stopping yet. They have plans to integrate features like pay per view and other forms of digital entertainment to the billing system again, all automated and driven by the central core application. Says Prabhat Pani, Ginger Hotels of the future will be even more IT centric in its operations to support the requirement of speed and reliability at low cost An integration this well planned leaves the door open to building other solutions that benefit both, customers and business. A CRM application that can see the services that a particular guest requests frequently will enable Ginger to customize services for such repeat customer. The same CRM will allow cross selling and upselling, or target promotions based on customer profiles.
An integrated CRM is on the cards that can customize services for repeat guests and enable Ginger upsell and cross-sell.
Shivdas stresses on the fact that expansion is critical for Ginger since it is a volume business. He brings to fore the fact that his enterprise architecture was built ground up to support expansion. Ginger has plans to grow to 70 locations from the present 26, and that will only require adding additional capacity at the datacenter, since the software foundation can easily scale to that number. He attributes this to the initial investment that the management agreed to, which enabled Gingerto build a scalable architecture. When a new property is added to the hotel chain, IT infrastructure wise, all that is needed are some inexpensive desktops, an internet connection, and configuring the VPN. With this, all applications required to run the new property will be accessible from the new location. Since the datacenter is a managed offsite datacenter, as the processing and storage requirements grow, adding additional hardware to meet these requirements is quicker as well. Foresight that prevailed during the early days of the business has resulted in business benefits today. Shivdas and Ginger managed to build that strong business-IT alignment which is elusive to many organizations, and the result is now a hotel that runs as efficiently as any enterprise backed by technology.