Ms. Stehle

Technology

Improving the Bottom Line with a Document Management Solution

By Tina Stehle, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Agilysys Hospitality Solutions Group

Success in hotel operations means reducing costs and improving operational efficiencies while enhancing guest satisfaction. The most visible benefit of deploying a document management solution is an immediate reduction in manual processes and volumes of paper. Companies that choose to deploy a document management solution gain a rapid return on investment. The costs savings are easy to see: dramatic decreases in the time and labor required to search for and retrieve documents, increases in work capacity and productivity and reduced physical space demands for filing paper copies of documents in offices and off-site warehouses.

According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the average U.S. employee spends up to half of the workday searching for information. In addition, companies spend $20 on average to file a single document, $220 to reproduce a lost document, and $120 to find a misplaced file. Consider that more than 10 percent of paper documents are either lost or misplaced costing a company thousands of dollars per year.

As you know, hotels must operate at peak efficiency in order to stay competitive and realize a profit. The ability to manage diverse paperwork registration cards, payments, guest comment cards, and vendor invoices as well as respond quickly to inquiries from guests, vendors and employees is critical.

Fortunately, it's never been easier to transform your paper-based system into a paperless environment. Converting to an electronic information system will allow you to do the following: improve business workflow and productivity, provide quick unlimited access to all your information, reduce the costs associated with time-consuming paper processes, enable compliance, and minimize risk. Most hotels can see an average return on investment in less than a year from an effective document management solution.

Enable Your Employees with Information at Their Fingertips

A document management solution allows hotel operators access to documents shared between different departments and different properties, including customer service, human resources, marketing, and purchasing while integrating with most property management systems and casino management systems. Current property management systems (PMS) produce volumes of reports and documents, ranging from night audits to guest and group folios. These report archives generate boxes of paperwork which must be distributed to multiple staff members and physically filed and stored. A document management solution can eliminate the costs associated with these manual report archiving methods by automatically capturing, indexing, and digitizing these reports from any PMS solution. Once the documents are archived, authorized users can access current or historical reports and/or documents directly from their workstations for online viewing, reprinting, e-mailing, or forwarding.

Your customer service team is busy putting out fires, answering guest inquiries/complaints, verifying shipments, and otherwise staying extremely busy throughout the day. If you're looking to ease some of their stress levels and help them become more productive, a document management solution can help provide the productivity boost your highly-trained team needs. For example, imagine your customer service team retrieving pertinent documents without leaving their desks-no more searching for folders in filing cabinets, no more trips to warehouses or offsite storage to retrieve important archived paper documents. Having everything automated enables you to link electronic document management with your customer service business applications. Team members can retrieve business-critical documents to answer inquiries, verify delivery, or even e-mail a copy of an invoice while the customer is still on the phone. Retrievable documents include: purchase orders, order acknowledgements, production orders, bills of lading, delivery receipts, invoices, and correspondences. A document management solution converts externally scanned/imported documents into digital images.

Install Safeguards for Corporate Compliance

Retaining and accessing hard copy credit applications and valid identifications is a full-time job, but with the right document management solution you can dramatically improve this process by virtually eliminating the need to manually file and retrieve these critical documents. You can automatically capture and archive any/all audit reports. Once stored, only authorized users can access current or historical reports, without leaving their desks. This offers substantial value by enabling more timely audits and other critical information for compliance.

Imagine the value of electronically storing all vendor invoices, purchase orders, requisitions, bill of ladings, and all financial reports in one central, secure repository for instant future retrieval. Think of how you can improve vendor/guest relations by having instant access to current and historical guest information, right at your fingertips. Also, an effective document management solution offers an unique and simplified way to electronically route documents such as capital appropriations, expense reports, etc. that require approval and/or review.

Streamline the Paper Trail

Another thing to consider is how much paperwork flows through your human resources department and the time it takes to find specific items amidst it all. Now imagine that same department where the paperwork is electronic and the retrieving of individual documents can be done within moments. All employee documents from resumes, W-4 forms, benefit and termination documents, and other critical materials can be easily scanned, digitized, and indexed in conjunction with your existing HR and payroll software solutions. Simultaneouslyfiling and storage costs can be drastically reduced. and you can see increased accessibility and security because users can view documents directly at their associated workstations.

Increase Customer Response Time

Another byproduct to document management is hotel employees can be at their desks, not digging through file cabinets, which improves response time. How often have your customers had to wait for files to be manually located? With an effective document management solution, you have instant access to data and the ability to deliver imaged records to the appropriate internal customer, or vendor destination in real time. Documents can be electronically routed and multiple users can use the same file simultaneously.

The bottom line is a document management solution impacts your balance sheet by improving the ability to create, search, extract, manage content, streamline workflow and leverage information assets throughout a hotel operation. When evaluating business process improvements, you must look at enhancing or eliminating manual processes and integrating an electronic system that streamlines the business cycle. By digitizing information, you will be able to access material anywhere and anytime and remove the many man-hours associated with searching for paper documents. And in this day and age, who isn't looking to enhance guest satisfaction and increase overall profitability? With the right document management solution, both are easy to accomplish.

Tina Stehle is senior vice president & general manager of Agilysys Hospitality Solutions Group. Agilysys is a leading provider of innovative IT solutions to corporate and public-sector customers, with special expertise in select markets, including retail and hospitality. The company uses technology — including hardware, software and services — to help customers resolve their most complicated IT needs. Ms. Stehle joined Agilysys in 2004 through its acquisition of Inter-American Data, Inc. (IAD), where she served as vice president of software services. Ms. Stehle can be contacted at 800-262-3600 or tina.stehle@agilysys.com Extended Bio...

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