This viewpoint is about money and baseball. Hotel company financial executives are like the general manager of the baseball team in Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.
The book argues that the Oakland A’s’ front office took advantage of innovative analytical measures of player performance to field a team that could better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball. If you are in the hotel business and are not familiar with the book or the movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Bean, GM of the Oakland A’s, you may find it educational because Moneyball is about how to use creative data analysis to compete more successfully.
How is hotel company operations like Major League Baseball?
Hotels are in competition for guests within their markets. They operate a physical asset with multiple expenses like staff, utilities, maintenance, pest control, and many have franchise fees. All these factors can be represented as data and analyzed to measure revenue, adjust expenses and calculate profitability – much like a baseball player’s statistics and the team’s winning average. The way a company uses business intelligence (BI) to view, analyze and act on data can give it a competitive advantage.
Flexible BI data analysis gives operators a tool to use like Billy Bean’s Moneyball spreadsheet to see their operation’s performance in unique ways. Bean’s Oakland A’s team proved that competitive advantage often comes from breaking away from ‘inside the box’ thinking and processes. Applying data analysis tools that enable you to think outside the box can provide new ways to see inside an operation and identify ways to improve performance.
Each hotel company’s operation is unique. Every manager and owner has his or her own experience-based perspective on how they want to run their business. They know which performance measures, labor costs, ADR, or flow-through percentage are important to their company’s profitability. This means the freedom to apply flexible analytics and create custom performance reports is essential to execute an operator’s measurement strategy. Totally-flexible BI reporting gives each operator the ability to analyze and run their business their own way based on their unique perspective and operational goals.
Read the full article at: Hotel Online
