Harnessing The Power of Data For Strategic Decision-Making in Hospitality

Significantly enhance operational efficiency, elevate the customer experience, optimize revenue management, and effectively target the right customers.

Ready for the season?

Labor shortages, flight disruptions, and unexpected obstacles continue to pose challenges.

With summer season in full swing, the hospitality industry anticipates a surge in guests. Navigating through these roadblocks and unprecedented situations requires a data-driven approach.

Planning in Hospitality Management

A number of issues point to the need for improved planning in the industry, including:

Unpredictable demand

Consumer behaviour and travel trends influence the hospitality industry heavily, which makes it highly volatile. Hospitality is an industry, that can be affected overnight by unexpected events. The flexibility and real-time insights provided by traditional planning methods, such as Excel, are not sufficient to respond to these fluctuations rapidly and effectively.

Revenue management complexity

Revenue management is an important aspect of the hospitality industry that involves dynamic pricing, room rate optimization, booking management, and maximizing revenue potential. Excel-based planning can struggle to manage the complexity of revenue management strategies and makes it difficult to analyze historical data, identify pricing patterns and create accurate forecasts. This can lead to missed revenue opportunities and suboptimal pricing decisions.

Inefficient operations

Manual planning processes in Excel can lead to operational inefficiencies, especially in large hospitality operations. Coordinating room assignments, staffing schedules, inventory management and other operational aspects can become cumbersome and error-prone. Inefficient resource allocation can lead to overbooking, understaffing or inventory shortages, negatively impacting customer satisfaction and operating costs.

Lack of collaboration and communication

Collaboration is critical in the hospitality industry, as multiple departments such as front office, housekeeping, food & beverage, and sales must work together seamlessly. Excel-based planning can hinder effective collaboration as spreadsheets are often shared via email or shared drives, leading to version control issues and communication delays. This can lead to misunderstandings, inefficient workflows and coordination issues.

Limited data analysis capabilities

Excel has its limitations when it comes to analyzing large amounts of data and deriving actionable insights. The hospitality industry generates huge amounts of data, including guest preferences, booking patterns, customer feedback and market trends. Extracting meaningful insights from these data sets using Excel can be time-consuming and limited in scope, hindering data-driven decision making and strategic planning.

Insufficient agility and adaptability

The hospitality industry must adapt quickly to changing market conditions, new trends, and customer preferences. Excel-based planning processes may lack the flexibility needed to respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges. The inability to simulate and analyze different scenarios in real time can prevent the industry from seizing opportunities and effectively optimizing operations.

One of the key approaches to respond to such events is a fast and agile planning approach.

Planning in Hospitality Management

  • More transparent, simpler, and faster planning
  • Enable the what-if analysis of various scenarios
  • Establish the automation of the planning process and enable the monitoring of plans and internal reporting by individual segments
  • Improve monthly planning and forecasting

Main Features

IBM Planning Analytics covers all aspects of performance management

Plan

IBM Planning Analytics covers all operational business areas and speeds up the process of planning throughout the organization.

It supports easily scalable models and flexible deployment, AI-infused planning values based on a different prediction model, collaboration across the whole organization, reporting, dashboards and organized planning process.

Simulate

IBM Planning Analytics empowers users with forecasting skills. It allows different types of scenarios based on a customer planning approach.

Owners of the planning process are able to define a number of planning cycles depending on business needs.
Our approach allows automatic or semi-automatic connectivity and dataflow between different business areas. Changes made in one module will automatically transfer data and recalculate KPIs throughout the whole solution.

Analyze

Because of a consistent data flow between all areas, users are able to instantly see and report changes, threats and opportunities at any level of an organization.

Reporting on top of planning a solution can be set in three different ways:

  • Cognos Analytics
  • PAX = Planning Analytics for MS Excel
  • PAW = Planning Analytics Workspace

All three interfaces allow us to use an existing model as a source for a dashboards and ad-hoc reporting. We support standard and mobile/tablet dashboards.

IBM Planning Analytics is a fast, flexible, and complete planning and analytics solution.

The solution has been praised by customers and analysts alike for its ease of use. It not only automates manual tasks but goes beyond automation to help you gain new insights directly from your data.

BM Planning Analytics helps organizations enter the cognitive age by enabling Hybrid Cloud Data Sheet 2 users to forecast outcomes based on evolving trends and perform in-depth what-if scenario analysis to test alternative assumptions. Users can create timely, reliable plans, put insights into action, and communicate with compelling visualizations.

Your Trusted IBM Business Partner

Our solutions connect all aspects of planning and integrate reporting and predictive analytics into the planning process. Our methodology delivers faster results and minimizes risk.