Hotel chain rolls out Oracle E-business suite

26 Jan 2009

The nationwide Tifco-owned Crown Plaza Hotels group has completed the rollout of Oracle Financials, Purchasing and i-Procurement across its six hotels.

System Dynamics, a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, used Oracle Business Accelerators to deliver a tailored Oracle E-Business Suite implementation, which was rolled out over a five-month period.

“By using Oracle Business Accelerators, we were able to reduce the time and cost of the implementation, while tailoring the solution to the specific needs of Tifco and providing the right mix of industry functionality and best practices,” explained Tony McGuire, managing director, System Dynamics.

“The approach allowed us to accelerate the user acceptance testing process to deliver a fully configured and integrated environment for Crowne Plaza’s business over a much shorter time period and achieve cost savings of around 30pc.”

The solution provides the hotel group with access to real-time financial information in terms of purchasing and inventory management across each of its hotels.

It also provides the hotel group with greater control of expenditure across all its cost functions, while simplifying and centralising its key accounting functions to achieve greater efficiencies and costs savings. 

Working with Oracle Business Accelerators allowed System Dynamics to ensure the rapid and seamless implementation of leading business process standards across the group.

The approach enabled the rollout of a fully integrated solution appropriate to the needs of Tifco, while achieving significant savings with speed of implementation and overall project costs.

“We quickly realised that the proposed Oracle solution was greatly superior to other products on the market, with added efficiencies and cost savings far outweighing the initial investment,” explained John O’Conner, financial director, Tifco group.

“The calibre of the partnership offered by System Dynamics and Oracle was a clear deciding factor for us in light of our expansion plans and requirements for a futureproofed system.

“In the present economic climate, managing costs has become very critical to Tifco as it expands its portfolio of hotels. The solution provides us with the drill-down capability to analyse exactly what is being spent on every item, from food supplies to courtesy coaches provided for guests.

“We can now use information in terms of volumes and costs of goods and services purchased to ensure the best prices are negotiated with our various suppliers,” O’Connor added.

By John Kennedy

Pictured: Crowne Plaza Dundalk

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com