National Hotel Group Makes Room for DocFinity® Suite of Document Management Software
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Question: When you are one of the largest hotel management groups in the country, how do you manage all of your incoming invoices, payments, resumes and customer comment cards, as well as answer daily inquiries from your properties?
Answer: Easily, with the assistance of document imaging and the internet.
American Hotel & Motel Association ranks this National Hotel Group as the 131st largest group in the country and they are among the five largest privately held firms based on the number of properties-55 and hotel rooms-over 6,000. It’s no wonder they had a paper problem.
This National Hotel Group has experienced quite a bit of growth since it began in1983. Four years ago, The Group relocated from New York with15 employees. Today, it employees 50 at the corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania and over 4,000 work at the various hotels and restaurants they own. The Group also has corporate offices in Texas, Colorado, and Tennessee.
In addition, they now own and operate 55 hotels nationwide. Properties include Hampton Inn, Embassy Suites, Marriott, Radisson, Omni and Holiday Inn hotels in 20 states. The types of hotels range from a 100-room Hampton Inn to 300-room properties that range from full service to limited service establishments.
With plans to build a new 110-room all-suite hotel and corporate headquarters, the last thing The Hotel Group wanted to do was have to accommodate room for the 50-plus filing cabinets that continued taking up valuable space. They decided it was time to move to a document management system that not only alleviated current and future storage and filing problems, but also cut associated costs and increased productivity.
The Hotel Group looked to DocFinity Imaging, a Windows-based document imaging program from Optical Image Technology, Inc. (OIT), to help manage their information. DocFinity Imaging allows for the elimination of storing massive amounts of paper documents, elimination of filing and re-filing of paper documents and the costly time spent searching through files for documents.
"With all of the growth we have gone through in the last 18 months, it (DocFinity Imaging) became cost justified as we kept buying more file cabinets and using more square footage," says the VP of Finance for The Hotel Group.
The DocFinity Imaging system is used for the storage and retrieval of all checks and back-up invoices for accounts payable. Their current volume is 5000-6000 checks per month from their properties, with invoices consisting of a single page to 15 pages per check. Invoice sizes can range from that of a small gas receipt to an 11x7 form that needs to be resized.
The Hotel Group receives several hundred calls a month from their establishments requesting information. The new system will lessen time spent on the phone and time researching for answers.
"Hotels call to confirm a bill has been paid, confirm a check has been sent, or get a check number to give to a vendor for payment, " explains the VP of Finance. "For accounts payable, the retrieval is very high in the first 30-40 days and then it sort of diminishes. We would keep at least a year close by and 2-3 years in close proximity in a store room downstairs."
it was only a 3-month process
The time it took for The Hotel Group to select a vendor, meet with OIT, and iron out fine details for the installation of DocFinity Imaging was a mere three months.
"The system itself was installed and running within one day," comments The Hotel Group’s Information Systems Specialist. "The next day we had training."
Hardware used with The Hotel Goup’s installation included a Fujitsu M3093GX scanner, a Yamaha Four speed (4x) read/write CD-ROM drive, and a Plextor 6x CD-ROM Tower. They are using DocFinity Imaging on an Oracle server for Netware running on an NLM (Netware Loadable Module).
"CD-ROM technology makes a lot of sense for their application," explains Scott Buchart, OIT President. "The volumes of data they are looking at did not appear to be so large that they could justify the Optical Platter costs, nor does the element of disk spanning versus two CD burning sessions appear to have much impact."
CD-ROM technology gives users the ability to remove a CD and view it through any CD-ROM reader. They can have the ability to even view this data from a laptop PC that has a built in CD-ROM reader. If executives are traveling to a property site and they need to take critical information with them for review with hotel’s management staff, they simply need the OIT viewing software on the laptop and then take along the appropriate CDs.
Comments the VP of Finance, "The users think it’s great. We have yet not to find an invoice, where we would sometimes spend hours looking for an invoice because it was misfiled. It’s very user friendly."
"If (the user) knows what the check number is, they can find it easily, " remarks the Information Systems Specialist. "They just enter the number. No more going to the filing cabinet. And if necessary, they can print it out."
"System itself was fairly simple and easy to learn," says one Scanning Operator. She is in the process of training another person to scan into the system.
The Scanning Operator has been responsible for scanning and indexing the images since its implementation. In two months, 56,000 images have scanned (approximately 6 CDs). At one point, The Scanning Operator scanned 10,000 images in one week. The indexing is by the check number. The user key index consists of a 4-digit code, vendor on check, check date and amount of check. Because of these efforts, the room that once housed 50-plus filing cabinets now consists of 2 cabinets.
"I average scanning about 27 images per minute on a 3093," comments The Scanning Operator.
expansion is in the works
The Hotel Group also has plans to expand the system into the tax department, with the insurance, benefits and payroll, capitals department, customer service and legal departments to follow.
"We already have planned to set up our tax department. We have over a hundred sales tax returns every month for the multiple states we’re in, which will be scanned in," the VP of Finance says. "The insurance and legal departments are eagerly waiting to get in."
The VP of Finance explains, "From a human resource stand point, we have 4000 employees, and as resumes come to us everyday, we’ll just scan them in and set up indexes so that we can create a data base for potential resumes."
The Scanning Operator is currently getting the customer service department ready for their transition. The Hotel Group’s customer service gets between 50-100 comment cards daily from their hotels. They currently have a backfile of about 2000. Executives will now be able to pull them up on their PCs and look at the responses.
As The Hotel Group’s executives and employees continue to see improvements through use of their document management system, so will their customers.
"Requests (from the hotels) will now be answered quicker," says The VP of Finance. "We also have plans via OIT’s Browser Access application, IntraVIEWER®, where the hotels can dial in and retrieve the information themselves. Our long term goal is to have an office with the least amount of paper possible."
