Sea Island Resorts is 'HIP' to Efficiently Managing Hotel Inventory and Purchasing
When you have 520 guestrooms and operate several outlets, including a beach-front resort, lodge, cottages, golf club, spa, multiple dining and lounge facilities, tennis center, beach club, shooting school, boating and fishing operation and camp cloister, managing the inventory and purchasing process can be challenging, especially when that process is not automated. That was the quandary for Sea Island (Ga.) Resorts before the company integrated the Hotel Inventory & Purchasing module with its existing Hotel Service Optimization System (HotSOS) from MTech.
HIP was designed to help hotel operators manage budgets, purchasing and perpetual inventory. For Troy Spannuth, administrative assistant to the engineering director and responsible for storeroom management at the Mobil five-star Cloister at Sea Island and Mobil five-star and AAA five-diamond Lodge at Sea Island Golf Club, HIP eliminates mounds of purchasing paperwork and streamlines record-keeping for immediate time and cost savings. When integrated with MTech's HotSOS, a solution that streamlines guest-services processes, such as guest-request and incident reporting, rapid-response workflow and preventive-maintenance workflow, HIP generates cost reports for service orders that will include labor and parts costs automatically.
"Orchestrating the inventory and purchasing process for the various outlets on Sea Island was a real nail- biter before we got 'hip' to the automated Hotel Inventory & Purchasing system from MTech," says Spannuth. "This centralized, computerized system makes maintaining storeroom control easy and extremely efficient. Before, all requisitions were hand written and the paper forms were kept in file cabinets in various locations. With HIP, all requisitions are now digital. That means, anyone with access to HIP on their computer can check on the status of order to determine if parts have been received and identify which work orders the ordered parts were allocated to. It's nothing short of amazing.
"In addition, HIP has cut down on any guess work as to which parts were ordered," he says. "Previously when we would fax hand-written orders to our purchasing agents, they often complained that they couldn't read what was written due to poor handwriting or inferior print quality of the fax machine. The digital requisition eliminates any confusion, and therefore the ordering process is quick and error free. This is really important, especially when we need to allocate costs/charges across multiple outlets and/or departments."
'SaaSy' solution
HIP, like HotSOS, is offered by MTech over the Internet as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. It can be integrated with HotSOS or used as a stand-alone module. HIP also provides:
- Budget management
- Purchase-order management, including back-order management
- Vendor management
- Inventory management that includes multi-warehouse support, barcode-label generation and inter-warehouse transfer support
- International currency support
- Configurable per-year periods
- Suite of reports
"Anyone running a storeroom manually today needs to get with it, and that means getting HIP," says Spannuth. "It's a simple checkbook style accounting system for getting things done right and having a digital paper trail of the process without the actual paper. Hotels that are fortunate enough to have HotSOS can really benefit from the integration because it makes ordering and billing a snap. But even without HotSOS, HIP is the coolest inventory and purchasing tool on the market, and its backed by the best support team in the industry."