Sandals Optimizes Profitability with Business Intelligence
Sandals operates a total of 22 luxury resorts carrying the Sandals, Beaches and Grand Pineapple brands and employs 10,000 people. Prior to 2003, Sandals manually collected and analyzed data for an international property portfolio that extends from Jamaica to the Bahamas, Antigua, St Lucia, and Turks. Managers relied on hand-populated spreadsheets and there was no way to gather and process all the data needed from entities in a reasonable time to make intelligent business decisions.
Sandals needed a dedicated hospitality business intelligence system that would automate data gathering from the entire Hotel Group, which had multiple systems, and perform timely, in-depth what-if analysis and performance reporting. In 2003 Sandals’ executive team implemented the Execuvue web-based hospitality Business Intelligence system (BI) developed by Aptech Computer Systems, Inc.
The BI automates the daily data collection from entities and created KPIs for occupancy, staffing, food costs, utility use and other expenses, as well as spend-per-room. The system consolidates data from all Sandals’ resorts in a data mart where Pearson and her team access and analyze it. The data that once took a month to collect is now in their hands daily.
The BI automates the daily data collection from entities and created KPIs for occupancy, staffing, food costs, utility use and other expenses, as well as spend-per-room. The system consolidates data from all Sandals’ resorts in a data mart where Pearson and her team access and analyze it. The data that once took a month to collect is now in their hands daily.
Sandals focuses on operating performance and how to increase it. The system generates daily management reports that include month-to-date (MTD) revenue, staffing, F&B and utility costs and forecasts with comparison to budget, YTD, and same period last year. This data enables Sandals to monitor performance daily and take corrective action by mid month to address trends before they become problems. The Sandals team also creates weekly reports for revenue managers that show revenue spending with actual sales performance and MTD vs. budget evaluation for all profit centers. To keep a tight rein on expenses, Sandals pulls data from all property P&Ls with side by side comparison to budget for current period, prior MTD, and YDT totals.