The Passing Lane

Much like a dashboard in an automobile, a digital computer dashboard, or graphic user interface, allows users to experience immediate visual access to mission critical data at the touch of a screen, and the technology is proving to be a powerful tool for restaurateurs and hoteliers. Digital dashboards traditionally consist of a browser window that lists a company's vital data on a single screen in movable modules similar to a "My Yahoo!" home page. From up-to-theminute money crunching to inventory control, dashboards are making life easier for the hospitality industry.

Casual driver
For Anand Gala, president of Golden West Restaurants, installing an e-Restaurant (erestaurantservices.com) dashboard solution into his seven Applebee's meant an end to the archaic Excel spreadsheet system that his managers were using to poll data. "We realized that we needed a solution that would provide us the information we needed when we need it," Gala explains, "a solution that was going to be adaptable for multi-concept as well as multiple locations."

The digital dashboard, customized for Golden West, features multiple modules of data information available at different security levels. At the restaurant level, managers can view, in real-time, a one-page screen that provides guideline criteria, the date of the last time data was polled, headline news relevant to the company, and a variety of alerts. All modules on the screen can be resized and repositioned for maximum viewing. "[The program] allows us to manage our restaurants without having to pour through all of the reports every day," Gala says.

All information runs through a broadband DSL Internet connection (though it can work over a dial-up connection). Polling occurs at various increments pre-set by the operator, ranging from every minute to once a week. As employees enter sales into a POS system, the information is polled to the backoffice computer server, allowing the dashboard program to gather the data from the server and reformat it onto the screen as a simple, one-page report. "We wanted a solution that any manager, whether they are a QSR manager or a full-service manager, could run regardless of their education level or computer literacy level," Gala explains.

"It's unfortunate that this industry is rather slow to adopt technology that is beneficial," Gala continues. "Part of that is because restaurants operate on such low margins compared to other businesses, and there isn't enough money to spend on new technology."

Maximum integration
I n the hotel industry, installing a digital dashboard not only proves to be a financial benefit, but also a way to speed up the entire check-in process. Front-desk employees can access guest information and room details from the dashboard's main screen, as well as a bevy of other data as soon as the guest is ready to check in.

For Belgin Onen, director of business requirements at InterContinental Hotels Group, upgrading to a dashboard system was the next step in taking full advantage of their Micros (micros.com) Opera property-management system. The dashboard function is an add-on that integrates directly with the hotel's front-end system. "The front desk agent can sign on and their default screen is the dashboard," Onen explains.

The Opera system is installed on a high-speed server and is access from the remote workstations. Users simply log-on to their Internet browser, which accesses the server. "The dashboard is very easy for the employees to use," Onen says. "Similar types of information they used to access through multiple screens is now available on one screen, increasing their efficiency. The front-end clerks can now spend more time with the guests instead of wasting time with technology."

Like the Fortune 500
Warren Winslow, corporate controller of the Peabody Hotel Group in Memphis, Tennessee, discovered digital dashboards after researching what Fortune 500 companies were using to run their back-office reporting systems. "There are all these big organizations out there, and if they can [use this technology], why can't we do it?" Winslow explains. "It's all a matter of adapting that type of reporting structure here inside the hospitality industry."

After months of research, Peabody Hotel Group settled on Aptech Computer Solutions (aptechinc.com) because of the vendor's background in hospitality management systems. Aptech's dashboard integrates Peabody's purchasing, payroll and general ledger systems into a single system via a common database. "The dashboard technology allows us to drill down these various bits of data and pull them out," Winslow explains. "Ultimately, the quicker we are able to get this data out, the sooner our operation folks can react to it."

Peabody used the system to link all 10 of its properties through a secure framework, allowing for real-time reporting and subsequent data collection through all of the company's hotels and corporate offices. Information is transmitted to Dell servers at corporate headquarters and is piped through a standard T1 high speed Internet connection to desktop computers at the hotels.

The dashboard technology in the computers then extrapolates the data into a variety of reports that are featured on the graphic user interface. Winslow says, "There's a lot of capability and a lot of function with [dashboard systems], and the more we begin to work with it, the more we have to benefit from it."