As corporate brand manager for a multi-property upscale resort management company or brand owner, you’re always looking for ways to ensure that guests not only enjoy their visit but have a consistently positive experience when visiting any of your properties. Typically, the guest experience boils down to four criteria: 1) the Real Estate, 2) the service, 3) the products in the hotel, and 4) the food.

Everything from the property location, to the soap in the showers, to the bed itself factor into the guest experience, and ultimately your brand.

So how do you maintain your brand to ensure it is consistent across all your properties while providing the right balance of local uniqueness?

There are a number of solutions that can help ensure that your standards are consistently followed across a multi-property portfolio. Over the past several years an explosion of web-based, industry specific software offerings has emerged and today there are a number of solutions aimed at the hospitality market that can help you manage the guest experience. Purchasing solutions and food cost/recipe management systems have been around for a long time, but today new enterprise-class versions of these solutions have emerged. The web has made geography a non-issue and the best of these new offerings have leveraged the web to provide a portfolio-wide footprint – with multi-property brand management in mind. They are packed with features designed to manage procurement, recipe development and capital improvement projects across an entire portfolio. In addition to the enterprise wide footprint, a key differentiator from earlier systems is the ability to configure in the right mix of central versus local control.

These hospitality focused solutions have the necessary features to cope with the rapid and special nature of food & beverage purchasing and come integrated with a full-feature recipe management solution – unlike generic solutions that assume all products come with barcodes and can’t deal with catch weight issues. eProcurement solutions are available with pre-wired interfaces to most hospitality industry suppliers providing near plug-and-play implementation. These systems allow corporate purchasing, working with brand management, to control the catalog from which all properties will buy. The same systems can be used to enforce IT standards to keep support costs down and to allow purchasing more visibility and control for better vendor negotiations.

Many of these solutions are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based. This means they are hosted by the software vendor and accessed via the user’s browser. By eliminating the need for heavy IT investment and long deployment cycles, these solutions are easily understood and deployed allowing hotels to stay focused on hospitality.

One global organization that is delivering money-making insights to their brand is Carlson Hotel Worldwide. An entire page was dedicated to their innovative initiatives in the March 21-April 6th issue of Hotel Business[R]. The advertorial highlights how this player has taken a forward thinking approach to revenue management by implementing a SaaS solution that ensures the usage of one common piece of software across multiple properties enabling them to shift from reactive to proactive planning. This acquisition is part of their strategy to gain market share by maintaining and expanding their worldwide brand.

Implementation of an e-procurement system can assist in maintaining control of the purchasing process by minimizing ‘rogue’ purchases. The ability to monitor adherence to approved vendor lists ensures that hotel properties reflect their established brand signature. As the hotel industry moves into a more global, technology-oriented arena, competitive advantages found in solutions such as automated e-procurement promise greater efficiencies, establish signature brand consistency and most importantly, ensure that guests keep coming back. One piece of advice – make sure the solution provider understands your industry. Make sure they offer single and multi-property solutions that help identify ways to leverage your buying power, control spend and automate your procure-to-pay process.

Author: Leslie McDonald
Article Source: EzineArticles.com