This can be a visitor submit by Joseph Landucci from BWH Lodges. In their very own phrases, “BWH Lodges is a number one, world hospitality enterprise comprised of three lodge firms, together with WorldHotels, Greatest Western Lodges & Resorts and SureStay Lodges. Our mission is to ship trusted visitor experiences, drive lodge success and foster a caring, inclusive tradition that respects the atmosphere. Expertise performs a key function in assembly these requirements.

My group helps analytics all through BWH Lodges, together with some affiliate and worldwide organizations. 4 years in the past, we switched to Amazon QuickSight, a completely managed, cloud-native enterprise intelligence (BI) service, and haven’t regarded again. In March 2021, I wrote about how QuickSight had helped us minimize prices by over 70%, whereas additionally enhancing our operations. Since then, we now have moved totally onto Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) from IBM Cognos and Oracle, and improved our BI adoption whereas navigating the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On this submit, I talk about how we’re utilizing QuickSight at present, the way it helped us by means of the pandemic and the way we’re utilizing it to construct the way forward for our enterprise.

Migrating to AWS and QuickSight

After a six-month proof of idea, we determined to maneuver totally to AWS for our knowledge and analytics wants. Our earlier BI resolution, IBM Cognos, was prohibitively costly as a result of we needed to pay for a license for every consumer. After we made the choice to make QuickSight our BI resolution, we have been in a position to transfer our inns from Cognos to QuickSight inside 10 months. Our affiliate customers made the migration 4 months later, adopted by our company customers.

Having used Cognos since 2008, this was not only a lift-and-shift migration. We decided what dashboards and knowledge we would have liked emigrate from our earlier resolution to QuickSight. In the course of the migration, we found that a good portion of what was in Cognos wasn’t getting used. With AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), we have been in a position to put our knowledge into Amazon Redshift after which construct dashboards with QuickSight.

Navigating the pandemic with consumption-based pricing

Shortly after we switched to AWS and QuickSight, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which impacted the hospitality trade significantly. If we hadn’t made this migration, we’d have been caught with fastened licensing prices. Because of the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing mannequin, we have been in a position to solely pay for what we would have liked when demand was decrease in 2020. Then when journey elevated once more, we have been in a position to seamlessly cut back up with demand.

This consumption-based pricing mannequin was one of many causes we selected QuickSight, which turned out to be a recreation changer throughout an unanticipated occasion. We didn’t must do any of the cutting down after which leap again up ourselves.

Elevated utilization and performance

Whilst we now have decreased prices, our enterprise BI adoption and utilization has gone up virtually tenfold. Our company customers and hoteliers discover QuickSight far more intuitive than Cognos. We have now 24,000 registered customers and eight,000 month-to-month lively customers inside BWH Lodges.

With higher utilization comes higher duty for governance and coaching. Once we started the transfer to AWS, we had a weekly governance assembly, which we now have now moved to biweekly. On this governance assembly, we decided how we have been going to standardize knowledge dealing with and set guidelines. These conferences additionally gave us the chance to supply coaching on the brand new instruments we have been utilizing, like QuickSight. Lastly, we additionally had studying periods which group members have been in a position to entry just about. Now, at any time when a brand new group begins to make use of QuickSight, we now have 3–4 years’ value of coaching materials to assist them rise up to hurry. We have now additionally discovered the coaching sources supplied by QuickSight to be helpful.

Enhancing our enterprise with QuickSight

The BWH Lodges Income Administration group was an early adopter of QuickSight. We have now round 20–30 particular income administration dashboards used each by company and hoteliers worldwide. Our gross sales group has applied QuickSight to carry out recency, frequency and financial (RFM) evaluation to find out which prospects it ought to prioritize. With these dashboards, our gross sales groups at each the company and property ranges are in a position to rating buyer and company accounts in order that they’ll optimize how they use their time. We have now additionally begun to experiment with sentiment evaluation based mostly on name heart knowledge that’s fed into Amazon Transcribe. Gathering a large number of knowledge after which visualizing it in QuickSight has made us a a lot nimbler group.

We’re additionally excited in regards to the worth we’re in a position to present to our hoteliers with QuickSight Paginated Experiences for creating billing invoices. With this new function, our lodge operators not must go onto the bank card processing portal to entry transactions. They’ll entry the knowledge they want proper inside QuickSight.

Constructing for the longer term

Within the close to future, we plan to embed QuickSight into our property administration system (PMS), AutoClerk. This may present BWH Lodges and our hoteliers with analytics inside their PMS, saving them time and giving them quick access to the knowledge they should enhance their companies. By together with analytics, AutoClerk will present unbelievable worth to prospects.

By switching to QuickSight, BWH Lodges has supplied extra worth to our hoteliers – growing adoption, saving cash and constructing for the longer term.

To study extra about how QuickSight may help your online business with dashboards, experiences and extra, go to Amazon QuickSight.

In regards to the Writer
Joseph W. Landucci serves as Director of Expertise Administration at BWH Lodges the place he has spent over eight years constructing and evolving their knowledge administration technique. On this function he’s liable for the administration and strategic course of six product groups: Database, Income Administration Methods, Information Providers, Loyalty Functions, Loyalty Automation and Enterprise Analytics.