Featured on SAP Business Transformation Study

I have been featured on SAP Business Transformation Study for Transportation and Logistics/Hospitality vertical on SAP.com. As I have pointed out before, I led Stonebridge Companies to be the first hotel management company to implement an SAP ERP solution in Northern America. The implementation took two painful years and we successfully went live with SAP Financials in October of 2007 and SAP HR/Payroll in January of 2009.

Some quick excerpts from the document:

Colorado-based Stonebridge Companies implemented the SAP® ERP application to automate paper-based manual processes for payroll, human resources, and financial reporting. The software has made information more available, timely, accurate, and consistent. It has also reduced costs related to system maintenance, external payroll processing, overnight delivery, and vendor late fees. Financial closings have been reduced by five days.

Based in Englewood, Colorado, Stonebridge Companies has developed more than 60 hotels across the United States since its inception in 1991. The firm has tripled in size since 2005 and currently operates more than 40 properties nationwide.

As the company grew, providing meaningful information to corporate managers, property owners, and investors became increasingly difficult, says Nasim
Mansurov, vice president of information technology at Stonebridge. Legacy software for enterprise resource planning treated each property as a separate database – making it cumbersome to get a timely, accurate, and consistent overview of the business or manage data-intensive financial and human resources processes.

Managing and Maintaining Multiple Interfaces

Individual hotels would fax hard copies of property financials to the corporate office, where the accounting team would spend several weeks manually compiling and analyzing the data. Having dozens of databases also made it difficult to incorporate new vendors into the system and pay them on time.

The hotels would send vendor invoices via express delivery. Invoice processing involved a long approval chain. Poor tracking resulted in late fees for missed payment deadlines. Responding to guests’ inquiries about their bills was also slow. Use of an external payroll service added
processing complexity and cost. “Interfaces were our biggest issue,” says Mansurov. “The system was costly and a nightmare to maintain. System security and licensing were also challenging.”

With help from the SAP® ERP application, Stonebridge has automated and streamlined the processes it needs to maximize new business opportunities.

A Single Platform for Process Integration

Stonebridge considered hotel-specific solutions for automating its information management processes, but decided that a single platform supporting many different areas made more sense. SAP ERP gave Stonebridge strong tools for human resources and financial processing as well as for developing its own hospitality-specific reporting. It was also important to Stonebridge that the software enabled vendor-invoice processing and collaboration with other external partners and that it provided strong support for regulatory compliance. In addition, SAP representatives provided close, personal attention during this major technology decision.

Greater Connectivity, Efficiency, and Transparency

With the new software in place, most data is captured electronically, and information is much more timely, consistent, and transparent. Hotel-specific reports with embedded statistics that Stonebridge developed in-house provide key performance indicators to help the company manage its business more effectively.

Individual hotels are fully connected to the corporate office, and new safety and control mechanisms let hotel staff enter and retrieve data themselves, says
Stonebridge CFO David Womack. He adds that hotel managers now handle all “hire to retire” processing for employees at their own property.

By automating its payroll, Stonebridge has cut processing time from one full day to several hours, eliminated two weeks of time spent on post-payroll issues, and reduced the potential for litigation due to improper payroll payments. By taking its payroll in-house, the company has also cut costs for external payroll processing. It has realized other savings through lower costs for document delivery and reduced late fees.

“We’ve cut five days off our financial closings and are managing our cash flow more effectively,” Womack says. “Our new state-of-the art platform should also make it easier to add new properties and will be an important competitive edge in attracting new clients, partners, and investors.”

Here is the link to the full BTS (Adobe PDF Reader is required)