An IDG Custom soLutIons InItIAtIve In AssoCIAtIon WItH

Transforming Business Through Judicious applicaTion of iT

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When Ginger Hotels embarked on a value model, everything had to be cost optimized. IT had to look at Ginger not as a hotel but as a process oriented enterprise. Heres how they did it.

INTERVIEW
The Cochin Port Trust implemented the first of its kind in India ERP to streamline and speed up its customer related and internal processes. N Ramachandran, IPS, Chairman, Cochin Port Trust talks about some of the benefits the ERP has accrued.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

ITGINGER HOTELS
AccelerATes GroWTH For
When Ginger Hotels embarked on a value model, everything had to be cost optimized. IT had to look at

Ginger not as a hotel but as a process oriented enterprise.

Heres how they did it.

Custom solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

usiness hotels are supposed to ooze luxury, posh service and of course, large bills. Ginger Hotels, a Tata group hotel chain adopts a rather unconventional business model and is unlike the stereotypical business hotel. Ginger emulates the way businesses think and operate the focus is on costs, value for money and keeping aside frills. Therein lies the essence of Gingers value proposition to its customers.

AlIGnInG IT WITH BUSInESS

When Ginger did a pilot project with one hotel (called Indione at that time), the approach to technology was more traditional and they used a homegrown solution. It was when the project was deemed viable and the hotel relaunched itself as Ginger, that the hotel chain saw the pressing need for business-IT alignment. It was at this point that TCS came into the picture, says Shivdas. The IT team was kept small, going with the idea of keeping headcount low, and support was delivered by TCS out of Mumbai. Given the unique nature of the business, he had his hands full in implementing an enterprise architecture all the way from conception to execution. On one side,

THE BUSInESS MoDEl

The hospitality industry is a manpower intensive sector. Ginger, however believes in running its show with as few people as possible. It relies instead on well defined processes that are enabled by technology. Ginger seems to have emulated the way its customers - various businesses work. This model helps Ginger keep costs in check and in turn pass that benefit onto its customers. In fact, the hotel says help yourself something that the customers are happy with, given that helping oneself is quite easy, thanks to the technology that is behind the intelligently planned processes. Since Ginger Hotels USP is low cost business stay. Hence, keeping operational costs low and expanding the hotel chain is paramount. And this is where technology walks hand in hand with business, enabling several hotel management processes that keep the lights on at the hotels, literally and figuratively. In the words of Prabhat Pani, CEO of Ginger Hotels, It was recognized at a very early stage of concept design and deployment that IT would be a strong pillar in the development and rollout of the highly-scalable Ginger model. If expensive and hard to find manpower was to be replaced by systems and processes effectively, Ginger had to look at itself as an enterprise, and also behave accordingly. This outlook allowed Shivdas T, Head - IS & IT at Ginger Hotels to build an enterprise IT architecture.

At the early stage of concept design we realized that business-IT alignment would be paramount for us to make Ginger scalable.
Prabhat Pani, CEO, Ginger Hotels

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

IT was required to support accelerated growth as the chain grew from a single hotel in Bangalore to now 26 across the country. On the other hand, keeping things lean and cost efficient was equally important. Off beat business models call for off beat IT models and thats what Ginger has implemented. While the traditional approach to IT is to solve business problems, in Gingers case, he had to understand the business model and preempt scenarios that would require ITs intervention. In a manner of speaking, problems were solved even before they arose. The resulting architecture is very different from the rest of the hotel industry. By doing this, Ginger has ensured that there is standardization across all its hotels, which helps in streamlining proceses and can also deliver uniform customer experience.

eNTerPrIse INFrAsTrucTure

AT GINGer

IT plays a crucial role at Ginger Hotels owing to the focus on cost optimization while not compromising customer service. Infrastructure consists of compute and storage in a hosted datacenter. Individual hotels connect to the applications through VPN on desktops. PMs (Property Management system) and other applications like accounting, run off a sAP backend, and all applications are tightly integrated and can talk to each other. Various processes revolving around guest servicing are automated like auto provisioning of Wi-Fi upon check-in. The model adopted allows for supporting new properties, while only capacity may need to be scaled.

InfrASTrUCTUrE AnD APProACH

Gingers core applications run off a hosted datacenter which helps in keeping costs low compared to manning one inhouse. All the hotels connect via VPN to the core SAP applications. None of the hotels require a server class machine for any of their needs. With just a handful of inexpensive desktops, the hotels can access applications and data using the VPN as a link. This also eliminates the need to employ skilled IT staff at each location. Today, Gingers hotels in places like Agartala and Gawahati are able to function perfectly with the connectivity available there. Ginger uses MPLS and RF for last mile connectivity, since it is more economical. This approach has its inherent advantages. All data is updated in real time since there is only one server in this model. Not only does the corporate office get a 360 degree view on the status of any or all of the hotels in the chain, this model also saves significantly on people costs.

our architecture enables rapid deployment and standardization across all our hotels
shivdas T, Head - Information Systems & Technology

Centrally managing the operations of each hotel eliminates the need for various senior functional heads in each locations. For instance, we dont need to have seperate finance, purchase, or HR teams since all such functions are managed centrally. Since the corporate office can see in real time every event that takes place, tasks such as finance, material procurement, employee record keeping, etc, is done centrally rather than on each location. This makes it easy for Ginger to grow their business, since all they have to do is put in a few PCs and hire a skeletal staff when they open a new hotel. The manner in which the enterprise architecture is designed takes care of the rest. Since technology is behind almost every area of operations at Ginger and is closely aligned to business, Shivdas says, half in jest, that theres such a tremendous trust factor with IT that the first door people knock on when they are faced with a problem is ITs even for those problems that are isolated from IT! On a more serious note, Shivdas has a word of advice for his peers in IT: the tighter the business-IT alignment, the more important it is to pay attention to expectation management. Reflecting on this, Prabhat Pani says the well thought mohit agarwal through investment of a feature rich IT system which consisted of ERP VP & linked Carnation Auto India (SAP) CIo, to the Property Manage-

Custom solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

ment System (PMS), in turn integrated to the Internet Booking engine (IBE) has really paid off.

THE BEnEfITS of InTEGrATIon

Applications for the hotel industry are typically classified into back office and front office management systems. The front office applications usually revolve around the property management system, while the back office applications generally refer to the accounting software. At Ginger however, the two logical blocks are a completely integrated system where the front office and back office modules can talk to each other. To elaborate this with an example: when a customer makes a booking online, the booking engine tells the customer that he has to pay a certain advance which is calculated based on specific policies that are applicable. Now this system is connected to a payment gateway which gives the user the choice of paying through various means credit card, netbanking, etc. Upon successful payment, the system confirms the booking via an email / SMS. Now heres where the power of integration lies: as soon as the customer makes the payment, that amount is reflected in the ledger immediately. Without such harmonious integration, the system would require manual intervention like data entry or authorization, which in turn leads to possibilities of errors and / or delays. This whole process takes less than five minutes from choosing a place of stay to receiving a confirmation of booking. Thats not all. Ginger takes integration one step further to the mobile, for customer experience and business benefit. Thanks to a tie up with ngpay (a mobile based shopping / booking service), a customer can view room availability and rates and make a booking, using just SMSs without needing a PC or Internet connectivity. Furthermore, on site, the various smaller processes which add to significant overheads in a traditional hotel setup are all automated at Ginger. For instance, the interface to generate keycards or billing for use of telephone and other services are available in one view, making guest management and logistics that much simpler. If the devil is in the details, then Ginger has conquered the devil. The hotel has a lot of tiny but nifty features that add to customer experience. For instance, upon check in, the guest gets an automated SMS welcoming him, which also contains the username and password for the free Wi-Fi connection that is offered. The login credentials are

valid for the exact duration of the stay all seamless and handled centrally. Traditionally, the guest would be issued a separate card for Wi-Fi access and an administrator would have to manually provision the access for each guest at each site. Sure, some of these value-adds are cool, but Ginger is not stopping yet. They have plans to integrate features like pay per view and other forms of digital entertainment to the billing system again, all automated and driven by the central core application. Says Prabhat Pani, Ginger Hotels of the future will be even more IT centric in its operations to support the requirement of speed and reliability at low cost An integration this well planned leaves the door open to building other solutions that benefit both, customers and business. A CRM application that can see the services that a particular guest requests frequently will enable Ginger to customize services for such repeat customer. The same CRM will allow cross selling and upselling, or target promotions based on customer profiles.

An integrated CRM is on the cards that can customize services for repeat guests and enable Ginger upsell and cross-sell.

GInGErS GroWTH MoDEl

Shivdas stresses on the fact that expansion is critical for Ginger since it is a volume business. He brings to fore the fact that his enterprise architecture was built ground up to support expansion. Ginger has plans to grow to 70 locations from the present 26, and that will only require adding additional capacity at the datacenter, since the software foundation can easily scale to that number. He attributes this to the initial investment that the management agreed to, which enabled Gingerto build a scalable architecture. When a new property is added to the hotel chain, IT infrastructure wise, all that is needed are some inexpensive desktops, an internet connection, and configuring the VPN. With this, all applications required to run the new property will be accessible from the new location. Since the datacenter is a managed offsite datacenter, as the processing and storage requirements grow, adding additional hardware to meet these requirements is quicker as well. Foresight that prevailed during the early days of the business has resulted in business benefits today. Shivdas and Ginger managed to build that strong business-IT alignment which is elusive to many organizations, and the result is now a hotel that runs as efficiently as any enterprise backed by technology.