Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group pursues digital finance transformation to support global growth
Building on proven partnership, luxury hotel leader takes Infor SunSystems to the cloud
Company
Industry
Product
Challenges
1
On-premise installations of the financial system at 37 hotels required IT resources to perform hardware maintenance and software updates.
2
Microsoft was discontinuing support of the underlying on-premise operating system, creating a potential for future security issues.
3
It was difficult to maintain consistency in accounting policies, procedures, and reporting across different hotels.
Solutions
1
Reduced burden of application infrastructure management by moving from on-premise to cloud, eliminating the need for hardware and centralizing software management to the global IT level.
2
Centralized data management lessened security risk and enhanced controls.
3
Applied best practices to standardize chart of accounts and accounting policies across all 37 hotels, leading to improved accuracy of global reporting.
Strengthening security and improving standardization and visibility
Infor SunSystems Cloud Edition is a scalable financial management solution designed to satisfy the global requirements of growing organizations, such as multiple books and charts of accounts, multi-dimensional analysis, multi-currency, and multiple languages. Additionally, Infor OS (Operating Service) wraps the solution in a standard technology framework that enables document management, approval workflows, machine learning, and analytics, and more.
Prior to moving to the cloud, Infor SunSystems was managed and maintained at the local property level. Now, with a multi-tenant cloud solution, Infor supports and maintains the solution, and Mandarin Oriental’s primary IT team at headquarters oversees the solution—freeing up resources and keeping local focus on guest experiences. Centralized data management reduces security risk and creates opportunities to standardize processes and improve visibility and reporting.
“Information security, data security, data privacy—we take these very seriously,” explained Ma. “Our first priority was to upgrade the system to the latest technology to sustain security and avoid downstream application supportability issues. That’s also the reason we moved to Infor SunSystems Cloud. We knew once we moved to the cloud, all the hardware would be managed by Infor and the system would be upgraded constantly.”
Cloud financial management offers organizations the ability to standardize processes and generate timely and reliable global reporting. To ensure the accuracy of reporting, data going into the system must be entered in the same way, across the same accounts, at every business location. Mandarin Oriental decided to put the work in ahead of cloud migration to standardize the chart of accounts and accounting policies at every hotel, in accordance with the Uniform Standard of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI)—the standard for hospitality that facilitates comparative financial analysis between hotels.
“We took this opportunity to standardize our Chart of Accounts (COA) among our hotels, so our effort in this cloud migration was a bit more than in past upgrades. We had to do data mapping, COA mapping, data migration and data validation. It gives us the advantage of standardizing our COA and from that we will get standard reports across all of our hotels,” said Ma.
Ma also noted that it was equally important to standardize accounting policies and procedures, such as where to book different types of expenses. “Standardizing our COA allows us to have better standards not just in reporting but also policies and procedures. Now everybody knows what account to use to enter a specific type of expense. If I want to track expenses for a specific item, I can run the report. Before I couldn’t do that because some people might put it here or put it there. In short, we now are able to write a report to get the information we need. But more importantly, we can advise the staff at our hotels how to apply accounting practices uniformly.”