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.

The hospitality and gaming industries require specific functionality when it comes to sales and catering, and event management. The same goes for family entertainment centers like bowling centers, laser-tag spaces, and others.

What are those factors? What should organizations in these sectors look for in software solutions to manage these important aspects of their business. The cloud has emerged as a proven alternative to the legacy systems used by the hotel industry.  One by one and group by group, independent hotels and chains alike, are seeking out a cloud-based platform to provide integrated solutions for their hospitality management needs. 

Beyond cloud technology, let’s look at some other event sales and catering software characteristics that contribute to the success of hotel and casinos as legacy systems are beginning to be phased out.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, set out to provide relief to businesses in emerging regions as the pandemic roiled global markets. Stephanie von Friedeburg, MD and COO of the IFC, looks back on the year in a recent podcast where she reflects the following:

“There's been a substantive hit on supply chains, trade shocks. And so our trade finance business, which has always been a core of our business, has grown very substantially. And we've seen it in the poorest countries in particular, where we know that we need to continue to keep trade flowing. So we've seen an increase in trade finance in that relief piece. We've also seen many of our existing clients needing working capital and needing liquidity, and we believe it was important for us when we typically don't do a lot of liquidity or working capital, but important for us to step in and help our existing clients to withstand the crisis, keep them solvent so that when we come out of the crisis, we can rebuild faster and better.”

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.

The existence of Conflicting objectives means we should look at aligning the processes and systems to enable us the make the appropriate decision and tradeoffs. But Siloed thinking and the Legacy systems deficit are making this more difficult to achieve.

There is no question that the solution is to first and foremost focus on people and process as we did in the second blog, Redefining the Processes, but technology can make a real difference to enable these processes and make the people able to focus on the important issues rather than the mundane task of data gathering and analysis.

The last 30 years have seen a huge expansion of global trade. Many of the goods we consume today are made in a different continents. The chase for the cheapest production location has resulted in complex, long lead time supply chains which have significantly increased the risk of disruptions, reduced supply chain efficiencies and increased our environment impact.

Future proof your supply chain with resilient and sustainable elements

Strengthening the supply chains in preparation for inevitable future uncertainties, and the need to be more sustainable whiles continuing to be efficient requires the development of processes, systems, and structures that enable rapid adaptation and resilience in the face of disruptions.

In this blog we’re going to look at the steps organizations can take to future-proof their supply chains, and at how they can build in resilience and sustainability elements.

A recent study, considered exactly this point. The study identified several key characteristics in this regard.

For supply chain professionals in your organization to receive the flexibility and agility they need to increase speed, drive down costs, and satisfy customers, there are four critical components your company must possess. These include real-time visibility, predictive insights, prescriptive decision support, and real-time collaborative execution, all of which can be achieved through the implementation of supply chain control tower.

Deploying a network model to achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility

Visibility is the foundation of every control tower capability, with all advanced decision making and responses within the execution window relying upon the quality and timeliness of visibility. Keeping order, shipment, and inventory status updated for all parties to see in real time is critical to success., but this often proves a core challenge for control towers, since highly dynamic supply chains can change at a rate of over 50 changes per second.