enterprise software, hoax or holy grail – part one

This is the first post in a three part series on enterprise software solutions.

“It's an enterprise software solution.” This has become a loose and liberally used term by hospitality technology vendors and hospitality venues. It is for many technology vendors the everything feature, used to answer questions about consolidated ad-hoc reporting, multi-layer configuration, shared data elements, and next generation architecture and interface support. “Yes we can do that, it's an Enterprise solution.” But the reality for most hospitality venues seeking the Holy Grail of enterprise systems is very different. Implementing a single enterprise solution is a complex task. Implementing multiple enterprise systems is difficult at best and may be impossible for some if not carefully planned and executed.

I consulted with a client who a few years back purchased a number of Enterprise software solutions with promises of decreased food cost, better financial reporting, improved menu analysis, and lower system support costs. They chose well established vendors with proven track records, working with each vendor to implement the system to take advantage of it's enterprise features. But like many other venues with similar initiatives, they found the project to be highly complex with problems the vendors had not prepared them for. The current outcome of their initiative was to remove one solution all together, delay the implementation of other solutions, and focus on retrofitting a single Enterprise system to meet business needs.

For some venues installing multiple enterprise solutions is not currently a reality, but for others it can be accomplished with a well planned project and diligent management of the the individual sites and vendors. Venues currently planning on migrating or replacing disparate technology solutions with one or more Enterprise solutions must consider these items before selecting a vendor(s).

research and document technical and functional operations.
Before choosing an Enterprise solution it is important to ensure that you can feasibly implement an Enterprise solution. This will be different for each type of venue, but four important requirements are network architecture, security permissions, site operations, and financial reporting needs.

Most enterprise solutions require some form of network solution that connects all sites, and many vendors them will request a dedicated or isolated network. In this day and age it would seem simple to get Internet access with all the options, but time and again venues (especially remote venues) find that Internet access is difficult if not impossible to get. For many a T1 or Fractional T1 is the only option, which can break the budget of many technology projects. To add complexity to the situation, your security team is waiting to tell you all the reasons the desired solution will not meet security standards. If it is not documented already, request Information Technology (IT) to document permission and access protocol for your network, and involve IT in the process of selecting your system.

If you are contemplating an Enterprise system it often means you have multiple locations spread out over a geographic area. And unless you are McDonald's each of these locations have defined their operations and are reticent to change. It is vitally important you understand and document these operations, from the front end user to the detailed reporting procedures used by finance. Be diligent in asking for any “customizations” that individual sites have made to their existing solutions. Pay special attention to finance since most established finance teams have custom spreadsheets or macros that have been created to work with their existing system. Interrupting this process without a replacement plan will not only create project delays but unhappy employees.

evaluate and change your operations.
When you have documented your operations it is time to make some hard decisions. One of the most difficult projects to undertake is deciding on your corporate standards. It is actually easy at corporate, but difficult at the site level. Management at individual locations are never excited about operational changes, and are often not willing participants. The success of your project(s) weighs heavily in the hands of local site management, and their participation is vital. Decisions need to be made in advance of your technology decision so that data requirements are understood and planned changes to operational processes documented.

Once these decisions are made, it is important to mandate the planned changes. Customizations at the site level will kill your enterprise project with poor transactional data. A top initiative of your Enterprise project should be to ensure quality data is being stored. Lots of operational procedures will ensure lots of disparate and duplicate data in your system.

understand hierarchy of data elements.
Now that you have your general operations down, you can begin to document the important data elements. These data elements are important for two reasons. First, they are the back bone of your reporting. It's the old adage of garbage-in-garbage-out. If you don't understand the data going it, the data coming out won't make sense either.

Secondly, data elements will be the measure to understand Enterprise hierarchy of your technology solutions. Pay attention, because this is important. Enterprise solutions are based on a hierarchy of data elements. For example, at the most basic level they will have a hierarchy of the business.

Corporation – Ownership Entity
Business – The actual business
Region – Sub definition of Business
Site – Physical place of business

Not all technology solutions will have all of these data elements, but most will have some subset. This however is the most basic hierarchy of an enterprise system. Each data element will then be associated with one or more of the above data elements. Some examples of sub-data elements are employees, revenue types, revenue centers, inventory items (whether food, rooms, tables, or people), and point of service (POS) devices.

When reviewing your technology options request a detailed data hierarchy from all prospective vendors. If they do not have this information, demand it. It is too important to your success to overlook. If they cannot provide it, then they are not worth evaluating.

diagram interface points.
If you have completed all the above successfully, you have done the easy part. You understand the operational requirements, documented important data elements, and have information on how your prospective vendors define those data elements. As great as it would be if technology vendors designed their architecture with other vendors in mind, they did not. They designed them with release dates, internal initiatives, and other customers in mind. Each data element from each vendor is a puzzle piece and the puzzle pieces must fit in order see a holistic picture of your data.

Careful attention to this step will make or break the success of your enterprise solution project. It is also important that someone with a strong technical understanding be involved in this step. Enterprise projects succeed or fail on how well the data elements fit together. I recommend putting together a simple table that creates a single view of how these data elements fit together. Having this information in a single view defines how each vendor's hierarchal structures complements and contradicts each other.

For example, if your Point of Sale (POS) solution defines revenue centers at the lowest level and your Property Management System (PMS) defines them at the highest level an interface architecture needs to be implemented to ensure maximum benefit is achieved from each system.
You've now made it to the vendor selection process. For tips on Enterprise Software implementations read Part 2 of this post.

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