As the manufacturing world continues to evolve to meet new challenges, there’s a step-change in innovation for the products and services that are delivered and supported. Many industry insiders are expressing the need for a focus on driving sustainable (and profitable) business growth. Deloitte suggests digital investment and supply chain resilience as the key pillars. Partnerships are also increasingly important to achieving sustainable business growth, whether that’s upstream or downstream within your supply chain or enabling partners such as application and technology providers.

In all of those partnering scenarios, it’s important to have a common understanding of your desired outcomes, so you can ensure you’re all speaking the same language, which helps shorten the time to value. Manufacturing is shifting towards industry-specific applications and these applications are now nearly always delivered in the cloud to maximize adoption, flexibility, availability, and security, as well as reducing through-life cost of ownership. In fact, Gartner forecasts end-user public cloud spending to grow by 18% through 2021.

Stability is important. Hotels, casinos, and resorts have guests they need to serve right now, today. Hospitality software solutions in place help them do that by taking care of the basics: reservations, check-ins, folios and check-outs, along with a staggering variety of in-house services and their associated charges. Essential software like hotel PMS is pretty “sticky” that way; it’s easier to stick to what you’ve got than it is to change. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Here’s the thing. Five years from now – perhaps sooner – the way guests engage with hospitality providers will likely look very different. Innovative solutions and platforms will be necessary to scale to that new paradigm, whatever it may be. So how do hospitality organizations know when it’s time to start planning for that? How do decision-makers know when it’s time to get unstuck? Here are 3 considerations to help answer that question.

As new hospitality technology emerges and as organizations increasingly invest in it, the ways people do their jobs change in response. Most of the time, this means greater efficiency, and a way for teams to concentrate on key tasks while the technology takes care of the necessary minutiae. Some of the time though, the rise of certain technologies can cause some concerns that with certain functionality in place, the human factor will get lost.

Hospitality AI functionality in hotel revenue management and in hotel pricing tools is a case in point. The conversation around automation via algorithms has been too easily positioned with a “versus” between machine learning solutions and professional expertise. Yet, the features of the technology and years of knowledge and experience held by revenue and strategy teams isn’t adversarial. The relationship between them is more about achieving greater focus and clarity. How do science-based algorithms in revenue management and pricing solutions help your organization do that? Let’s look at some key points.

Traditionally, almost all business intelligence and analytics solutions were designed as general-purpose platforms or desktop tools suitable for any industry, department, or use case. That does mean, of course, that the burden of developing data models, data pipelines, dashboards, and reports falls to the customer. They effectively start with a 'blank sheet of paper,' which, in theory, can be developed to fit the organization's exact needs. However, the reality is that the organization may not have either the skills, resources, or time to develop an analytics solution that quickly meets business requirements.

The answer to avoiding this overhead of entirely homegrown analytics is to use a modern analytic application that can deliver ready-to-use analytics, right "out-of-the-box." Deployment and adoption of these analytic applications are accelerated because of built-in content developed by industry domain experts that understand the industries, roles, data, business applications, and specific analytics required by typical business user personas. A significant amount of development time can be saved because this domain-expertise-driven content can replace typical internal development processes.

Michael A. Lea is a 25-year technology veteran who has demonstrated strong consultative sales management and leadership qualifications, and continues to remain a thought-leader about advanced software and business solutions designed to meet the diverse and rapidly evolving business demands of his clients

He has held various positions of increasing responsibility such as Senior Technical Sales Consultant for Infor, VP of Sales & Business Development for Coolearth Technologies, and most recently as a Consultative Sales Executive for Bora Enterprises.

A. The priority and goal for any process manufacturer is to have complete lot tracking and traceability. This is commonly referred to as the “genealogy” of all raw materials, resources, and assets that enter a facility, and remain within the four walls of the facility until it passes through the facility as a final product or goods.

Real-time, accurate data and visibility are a necessity. The OTC (Order-to-Cash) systems and solutions must be closed-loop and work in conjunction and seamlessly from customer order/demand through the PTP (Plan-to-Produce), the manufacturing process (including vendors, suppliers, and co-packers) and then finally shipping, distribution and logistics.

As a consultant I’m frequently asked what is the main pitfall towards achieving transparency and traceability? This is a hard question and a huge consideration for manufacturers as each situation is different and unique. It’s one of the first things we address in our strategic consultation.