The Analytic Hospitality Executive

APPENDIX 1Case Study from Infor: Analytics Opportunities in Operations

Infor builds beautiful business applications with last-mile functionality and scientific insights for select industries, delivered as a cloud service. With 14,000 employees and customers in more than 200 countries and territories, Infor automates critical processes for industries including healthcare, manufacturing, fashion, wholesale distribution, hospitality, retail, and the public sector. Infor software helps eliminate the need for costly customization through embedded, deep-industry domain expertise.

Bernard Ellis, Vice President of Industry Strategy for Infor, provided the following perspective on analytical opportunities in operations.

Hotels have been practicing revenue optimization relatively effectively for the past decade or so, to the point where revenue-managing rooms has become a game of small incremental adjustments. Particularly recently, with rates at historic highs, there just isn’t that much further to go in driving room revenue. Yet all of the revenue optimization expertise at hotels, and casinos, tends to be narrowly focused on managing room rate. It’s time to switch to a broader enterprise-wide effort to move the needle on revenue and profits, what I call hospitality enterprise optimization.

This may sound very similar to total hotel revenue management or total hotel profit optimization, where revenue management techniques are also applied to all ancillary revenue sources, like spas, restaurants, ...