Turning Elite Hotels’ data into actionable insight

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Data platform created with Epical opens road for future

To succeed in its business, Elite Hotels of Sweden must really understand the underlying patterns in their business data and quickly respond to shifting demand from customers. Together with Epical, the company built a data platform responding to these needs. Now, they can easily access and analyze their vast data across different properties, and use it to learn for the future.

CLIENT OVERVIEW

Elite Hotels of Sweden is a classic family-owned hotel chain, with more than 40 hotels in restored historical properties throughout Sweden. The company also operates three congress centers, and The Bishops Arms gastropub chain. Elite Hotels’ unique and charming accommodations are the pride and joy of the towns where they are located.

CHALLENGE

Insufficient reporting capabilities hindered development

Elite Hotels needs aggregated reports across its properties to run its daily business, define its strategy and make good decisions. Comprehensive reporting was difficult due to lack of suitable capabilities.

Previously, rich but inflexible business intelligence was provided by old hotel reservation system. As Elite Hotels migrated to a new reservation system, they lost their BI capabilities.

The new reservation system was not suited for comprehensive reporting across the chain.
Running reports, collecting and aggregating data required a lot of manual work.

Limitations and shortcomings were hindering business and development.

– The biggest pain point was chain-wide reporting. We could rely on built-in reports, but mostly just hotel by hotel. Getting a good overview required a lot of manual work: we needed a better solution, says Anders Silverplats, Reporting Manager at Elite Hotels.

SOLUTION

Data platform built from scratch to support business

Elite Hotels needed to improve their reporting capabilities and modernize their data platform. Epical supported them from the very beginning.

Main goal was to gather data in one place. This included data from the hotel reservation system and other sources, such as conference and event data, restaurant software, financial reporting software, budget data, room rate fluctuations, competitor benchmark data and master data.

Epical helped to structure the demands, describe them technically and clarify practical goals.

New data platform was built on Databricks.

Reporting solution was based on Power BI.

Epical provided strong technical and project managing expertise from start to finish.

Strong knowledge of hotel business made it faster and easier to understand specific needs.

Epical had great curiosity and patience with us. They listened to our ideas and asked us to elaborate and state them more clearly and concisely. They made us structure the requirements and think them through from a technical, user and business standpoint

– Anders Silverplats, Reporting Manager, Elite Hotels

– The project required many competencies: business understanding, architecture and data modelling, reporting and data transformation and training for end users. Our team has worked close to the customer offering what’s needed at each phase, says Magnus Fälth, Principal Consultant at Epical.

PARTNERSHIP – WHY EPICAL?

Outstanding technical expertise with personal touch

Elite Hotels highly appreciates Epical’s skills and support provided during the project.

Excellent technical expertise: any technical issue is faced by finding the problem and fixing it.

Strong relationships and trust between partners make cooperation easy and enjoyable.
High-quality on-going development and continuous delivery. Epical listens tirelessly and responds quickly.

Epical’s technical expertise is outstanding, but what really sticks out is the personal touch. They have built up a great understanding of our business and the data platform. Having a partner that cares and works with us to do better is hugely beneficial. The collaboration goes beyond business needs, operations or technical details: the partners at Epical almost feel like coworkers.

– Anders Silverplats, Reporting Manager, Elite Hotels

BUSINESS IMPACT & OUTCOMES

High reporting capabilities unlocked business potential

Elite Hotels reached a whole new level in their reporting capabilities. The response from internal customers has been extremely positive; they have made use of the new possibilities since day one.

Data from different systems can now be accessed and combined fast and easily.

There was a shift in philosophy. Elite Hotels no longer relies on system vendors for their data needs. Instead, they have power to do what they want with their data.
Sales departments can analyze patterns in customers’ behavior and use data to succeed in business negotiations with corporate customers.
Long waits are history. Updated data is available instantly, at a moment’s notice.
Large-scale, fast data access and flexible reporting have led to a boom across the business.

– We have achieved our main goals. We have aggregated data from our primary reservation systems as well as other systems, making it possible to create reports and provide them to different departments. Epical built us the flexibility to choose and decide quickly for ourselves and we appreciate that. That was the main thing that we accomplished, Silverplats says.

FUTURE OUTLOOK

Focus on maintenance while expanding horizons

Elite Hotels has built a mature solution with Epical, and from now on the focus is on scaling and refining the platform. They are not done yet: there is still a lot of potential to unlock.

– We have learned so much over these years and improved at doing our own reports. A lot of things from now on is fine tuning, but also opportunities to do more, do better, and expand our horizons, Silverplats resumes.

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