Kempinski Hotels Gains Robust Financial Reporting with Infor10

1/16/2012
Every Kempinski hotel is unique. Whether a luxurious city hotel, elegant country estate, or sumptuous holiday resort, each of Kempinski Hotels' five-star properties has its own style and character.

For some time, almost all Kempinski hotels have used Infor10 Corporate Performance Management (PM10) to produce reports, budgets, and plans on a shared platform. The sole focus of Kempinski Hotels is the management of luxury hotels on behalf of the hotel owners.

Although Kempinski already had a software solution for reporting, controlling, planning, and budgeting, each hotel independently performed many steps in the process using spreadsheets. These were then distributed throughout the group, along with errors and inaccurate data resulting from manual entry and multiple versions.

"For a long time, we produced financial reports for the group using spreadsheet software," says Keith Robertson, SVP, global finance, at Kempinski Hotels. "But, we needed data that was 100 percent reliable. So, a few years ago, we began the search for a new solution."

Getting Business Specific

The goal was to put in place a fully integrated reporting platform for all hotels around the world and to make it centrally available, eliminating multiple versions and manual errors. All group reports would then be collated within the same database, while providing a system platform for group-wide budgeting and planning.

Seeing Results

Implementation of Infor10 Corporate Performance Management was extremely fast. "We received outstanding support from Infor and were able to use the new system within a few short weeks," says Robertson. More than 300 users currently access the system with an easy-to-use Infor10 Corporate Performance Management web front end, while the power users also employ a sophisticated Infor10 Corporate Performance Management front end based on Microsoft Excel.

"Naturally, we now use Infor10 Corporate Performance Management for our financial reports. Prior to this, we could only produce them every quarter because the task was simply too large. Now, we can produce the report once a month without much trouble. What's more, the data is now reliable enough for our auditors to accept it and to use in analyses."

For managers, the dashboard functions in Infor10 Corporate Performance Management provide critical information in real time. On a single page, they can see an overview of overall business, the general situation at individual hotels, or information about specific departments such as finance or purchasing. At a glance, executives can see the current data compared to the budget and future plans.

Infor10 Corporate Performance Management incorporates forward-looking processes such as planning and forecasting. As a result, Kempinski Hotels can now test and compare a variety of "what if" scenarios, investigate assumptions, and model business to meet targets and high-level objectives. Various combinations of goals, forecasts, and key drivers can be tested in a matter of minutes to define achievable and realistic financial goals.

Kempinski Hotels can also specify the data sources that the system uses for future planning. Analyses of certain regions or single hotels are now possible, as well as group-wide benchmarks.
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