Cloud technology in the hospitality industry is changing the way that hotels, resorts, and gaming organizations serve guests. The deciding factor to success is in how simple it is for a guest to get what they want from a hotel via their own personal devices even before they arrive at a location. Essential mobile-based technology enables them to book a room, to set arrival times, to upgrade a room, add services, and more, all without necessarily having to make contact with staff.

That call for contactless solutions delivered via cloud PMS is a priority for the industry right now. This is for convenience reasons. Yet it also has social implications in an era of maintaining distance and limiting contact. How do cloud-based solutions make that easier than legacy on-premises solutions? Let’s take a look at some of the details.

As fashion organizations grow to introduce new products or clothing lines, acquire other companies, shift priorities, and change channels to market, key stakeholders can be left out of the conversation. A networked approach to running your company can solve these problems. Collaborative networks work because they engage internal and external partners, workers, and stakeholders, helping to incentivize and execute supply chain processes more effectively than ever before.

New insights will continue to emerge as consumer behaviors shift and production opportunities evolve, but a continuously synchronized and updated network can keep you agile from sketch to store by making critical information accessible to colleagues, organizations, suppliers, and customers. Collaborative networks work to improve customer service, maximize margins, and minimize loss attributed to miscommunications such as missed inventory targets, downtime, spoilage, and other challenges. 

When extreme levels of disruption occur, supply chains immediately launch a survival strategy that tends be focused solely on the enterprise, leaving upstream and downstream trading partners to fend for themselves. Whether scrambling to enable remote work opportunities, implement flexible or staggered labor scheduling, or launch multiple capital preservation strategies, organizations have begun employing a variety of strategies to protect their supply chains and weather the storm.

To ensure the health of the overall supply chain network, the urgency to digitize processes and documents that allow both data and capital to be unlocked has become more prevalent than ever—particularly when a complex number of parties, systems, and document across geographical regions and time zones are involved.

1.Critical system failure

Your ERP system crashes in the middle of the night and you are not aware of it until the next morning. Restart and recovery will take several hours, causing a significant loss of revenue.

IT personnel determine that the system crash was due to the failure of an of an aging server with insufficient capacity to handle an ever-increasing amount of transactional data. The CIO refuses to allocate more funds to the outdated and poor performing ERP system infrastructure and charges you with finding a cost-effective solution that will minimize the chances of future system failures.

Improve business productivity and agility

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are helping businesses around the globe—including your competitors—revolutionize their operations. Distributors of all sizes are adopting technology that is designed to better manage business processes on an integrated and real-time basis. Technologically advanced ERP systems are an investment in your company’s operations, efficiency, intelligence, and productivity. Every feature of a modern ERP system ultimately ties back to these improvements, which enable your organization to become more productive, more competitive, and better positioned to meet your customers’ needs.

As these business systems evolved, they met the needs of their times, but their functionality was directly limited by the available technology. Today’s ERP systems might be better called digital operations platforms (DOP) to reflect their agile, artificial intelligence (AI)-based, and experience-driven nature, as well as the critical role they play in cloud-based, digital businesses.

Technology advances have transformed what an ERP (aka DOP) can do for your organization. Modern ERP systems provide a live view into what is happening and how it impacts your business today, as well as in the months and years to come. This helps you to focus on the future instead of the past.

Why a modern ERP makes business sense

In today’s fast-changing business environment, modernization can have a strategic impact on your business. Without access to a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, it can be difficult or even impossible to support new business models and keep up with evolving customer demands. Whether you’re planning to upgrade your current ERP system or implement a brand new one, getting your system up and running quickly is the key to obtaining a fast return on your technology investment. No matter how complex your organization is, a variety of agile implementation practices can speed transformations—and deliver game-changing returns.

With the rise of innovative hotel software in a radically changing era, trend lines continue to slope in favor of an integrated hotel management system that emphasizes mobile and guest-driven processes, all managed above location in the cloud. But there are many organizations who continue to stick to the on-prem status quo.

This hesitancy to change is a barrier for many organizations to see the benefits to their businesses in the long run, particularly in an era when alignment across all hotel properties is as essential as ever. To help address that, here are 4 common hospitality cloud software myths to better understand and then dispel while competing in a fast-moving and constantly evolving hospitality industry that is set to face new challenges.

It's not just about technology, it's all about responsibility

The technical aspect of different delivery methods described in the previous blog post in this blog series of, is of course an essential part of the factors to consider when choosing the right ERP solution for your company. However, what is perhaps even more important to understand is the division of responsibilities between supplier and customer when it comes to the different options. There are major differences between the delivery methods, but there may also be differences within the specific method.

ERP Delivery methods from a responsibility perspective

Below Håkan Strömbeck (Senior Industry & Solution Strategy Director at Infor), describes the different ERP delivery methods from a responsibility perspective. The description is made from a general perspective for all option, except for the "multi-tenant" option which is described based on how things work at Infor.

Adaptability and quick turnarounds on strategy had never been more vital during a challenging decade for the restaurants and food services industry so far. The good news for many is that so many organizations rose to that challenge, with restaurant technology playing a singular role in helping them to continue to meet demand and to serve guests via multiple channels, specifically using advanced restaurant point of sale and integrations with mobile ordering.

As much as the industry landscape has been defined by challenges and disruption, it’s also allowed decision makers to consider how present conditions help to anticipate what the rest of the decade might look like. This has meant looking at the basics, the essentials for successful restaurants to best consider and the continuing role restaurant technology will play. Over the last few weeks, we’ve published several posts that explore these factors. Here’s a summary to consider.