Best Western Sterling Inn

About

Located 15 miles northeast of downtown Detroit, the 155-room Best Western Sterling Inn caters to business clientele as well as travelers. Restaurant, banquet, catering and conference facilities represent a significant portion of Sterling Inn's business, and require their own business processes in addition to the hotel management functions.

Business Needs

The DOS-based hotel management system The Sterling Inn had purchased about a decade ago was causing frustrations. Users accustomed to Windows-based packages found it difficult to navigate the complicated menu system. The only way to extract information from the system in most cases was through paper reports, and the information from these reports often had to be entered by hand into spreadsheets. Posting operations, printing reports and other processes took a long period of time and, while they were running, users had to deal with lengthy response times.

Victor Martin, President of The Sterling Inn, made the decision to upgrade to new software based on the latest Microsoft Windows technology. "The developer of our hotel system was abandoning their DOS-based system in favor of a new Windows package," Martin said. "They were planning to eliminate their accounting system and also drop support for sales and catering. This prompted us to look for a new hotel solution. We selected Jaguar from Hospitality Solutions International because it offers a modern solution with strong sales and catering capabilities."

Solution

Like nearly all hospitality software today, Jaguar does not provide an accounting system, but instead recommends that users choose from the leading mid-market solutions. "We began by evaluating various technology foundations. We then made a commitment to use the Microsoft SQL Server database because we believe it offers the fastest performance, greatest resistance to data loss and the ability to communicate with a large number of third party packages," Martin said. "That decision reduced our choice to just a few mid-market accounting packages, each of which would have probably met our immediate needs. But, we wanted to select a product that would provide much more advanced capabilities that we could utilize in the future as we grew."

"Dynamics stood head and shoulders above the other packages that we looked at because of its expandability," Martin continued. "While our initial implementation didn't take full advantage of these capabilities, we are planning to expand our accounting operations over time and are confident that we have a program with plenty of headroom that will allow us to automate nearly every aspect of our financial operations in the future."

Integration

The ability of Microsoft Dynamics GP to interface with a wide range of other software has helped the company save time by automating business processes. First of all, the company created an interface to automatically transfer revenue information from Jaguar to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Microsoft Dynamics GP includes an integration tool that made it possible to create the interface in a short period of time without any coding. Now, it only takes a few minutes each day to import the revenue information from the hotel management system. In the same way, files generated by the company's time clock are now automatically read into the system, saving considerable amounts of manual data entry time and preventing data-entry errors.

Benefits

Since migrating to a Microsoft Dynamics GP solution to meet its distribution requirements, Sterling Inn is experiencing a wide variety of benefits in the areas of human resources and data integration.

• Saving Time with Data Entry. Lori Abbey, Controller for the Sterling Inn, said that implementation of the new software has already saved considerable amounts of time. "The time that is required to perform nearly any accounting task is substantially reduced with the new software," Abbey said. "Rather than making me enter every last piece of information, I just have to enter the bare minimum needed to define my intentions. For example, to select a supplier I just type the first few letters of their name and the vendor pops up."

• Obtaining Information Faster. Abbey said that one of the most important advantages of the new software is the way it helps her find information faster. "Rather than having to retype information from reports that don't quite fit what I need," she said, "I can modify the report or create a new one from scratch with the Dynamics Report Writer. These reports can draw data from any module or table and can include filters and calculated fields. It's so easy to create a Dynamics report that I rarely have to transfer information to spreadsheets any more. The FRx Financial Reporter lets me generate financial statements in exactly the format I need simply by selecting rows such as account codes and columns such as dates."
• Human Resources. Prior to implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP HR and Payroll modules, the process of providing 401k information to the company's plan administrator was a painstaking and time-consuming one. Each month, Abbey generated a spreadsheet that detailed the contributions of each employee and their investment selections. Using the Microsoft Dynamics GP integration tool, Martin created an interface that now generates the required information with the single push of a button. Now Abbey simply e-mails the file to the administrator. Sterling Inn employees are also taking advantage of direct deposit capabilities offered with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Abbey believes that using the Microsoft Dynamics GP HR application is helping them save time too. "Human Resources tracks a wide range of information relating to employees and lets us produce government-mandated reports in much less time than was required in the past," Abbey said. "For example, we track the I-9 employment eligibility forms for each employee. If an employee is injured, we record the information and use it later to generate OSHA reports. Before, we had to pour through our paper records to find that information and then re-record it. All in all, Microsoft Dynamics GP provides us with substantial time savings that affect nearly every area of our business."

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Date Published: October 2003