The hospitality sector serves millions of customers every day. Each of them checks in and out with their own expectations. Some only need a room to stay during a business trip, while others demand additional services and spend thousands of dollars on restaurants, dining, entertainment, sports, and spa treatments.
The ability to manage those personal preferences and provide available services and rooms to make customers happy is a key factor in staying ahead of the competition.
Big data in the hotel industry
To manage a personalised experience, the hospitality industry needs an advanced data analytics solution. Customers leave a huge amount of data behind after every check-in and check-out. It is not only about personal and contact information but also about the services they used, the foods they ordered, and the facilities, such as meeting rooms, tennis courts, and swimming pools, they booked.
These data sets are multiplied by tens or hundreds of entities owned by the corporation. The era of paper records is long gone. Everything now has to run digitally and be put into databases. To meet these new requirements, databases should be designed to be fast, efficient, and easy to maintain.
On-demand webinar: Reimagining Hospitality: How Technology Is Shaping Guest Experience & Business Growth | Watch now
Big Data requires new technology
The relational database management system has limitations
The common database system is a relational database management system (DBMS). The traditional technique of entity-relationship (E-R) modelling and structuring a chain of tables is very popular among database administrators or designers. However, it has become obsolete and inefficient when running queries at the scale of a large hospitality corporation.
SQL queries often involve joining tables, and they are re-executed and re-indexed every time they are called, which very likely results in a performance hit when dealing with millions of data rows.
Moreover, when needed, these queries need to be programmed by the IT department, whose strength is not often in data processing. The failure rate is very high when they are deployed in the live environment. Otherwise, corporations need to hire in-house IT professionals for data processing, which increases cost or outsource to third-party professional services for data development, which slows down the response to management’s needs.
Infographic: From Data Overload to Pivotal Action: How OLAP Powers Smarter Decisions Across Industries
OLAP is the way to go
Conversely, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology, one of the kinds of multi-dimensional databases, represents data in a hypercube, where data is stored in a single cell, which is accessible by multiple dimensions. A cube can be demonstrated as below.
The cube above consists of three dimensions Customers, Products, Time. Every dimension has all its related information lined up (customer’s name, product name, and order time), and every cell (units sold) is a unique combination of the elements in the dimensions. In OLAP, all the dimensions are combined together by design, so there is:
- No table relationship or constraint required
- much lower chance of a performance hit. As there is no table join to process, a simple “query” in OLAP quickly returns the appropriate cell. This would result in a big performance boost in an environment with a huge number of transactions.
- quick data roll-up. A dimension can be designed as a hierarchy as below
As demonstrated, customer units can be quickly rolled up to the upper level based on management’s requirements. For example, if Vietnam and Singapore recorded units sold of 100,000 and 150,000 items, respectively, Asia Pacific would automatically get 250,000 items when queried.
Read more:Winning the guest in the age of Hospitality Personalisation
Advantages of multi-dimensional database design
- Data presentation: raw data from the multi-dimensional database can be exported in a datasheet view and be presented on familiar Spreadsheet applications like Excel. This view would require complex SQL programming to generate, and it is obviously not a suitable tool for the end-user.
- Easy maintenance: Unlike relational database systems, which would require complex SQL table joining and indexing when management needs more dimensions for analysis, multi-dimensional databases, especially the Infor BI platform, provide the capability to add and drop dimensions on-the-fly. The maintenance is so easy that no data specialist is required.
- High performance: data in the OLAP database is stored the way it is viewed, so there is no overhead of table join to compute when performing the query. There might be little to no difference in speed to the relational system in small-scaled transactional volumes, but the performance impact would be very noticeable when it comes to the level of data amount in the hospitality industry
OLAP in Infor EPM
What is EPM?
Infor EPM is an application designed for controllers and CFOs at the corporate level, with tens to hundreds of entities beneath them. The application can be used in various industries such as banking, insurance, and especially hospitality as these modules are configured to meet the industry standards in:
- Management Reports
- Budgeting and Planning
- Capex and Workforce
- Financial Consolidation
Read more:Automating financial forecasting for hotels with Infor EPM
Infor BI platform
Infor EPM is built on Infor BI, a platform developed by Infor that uses OLAP technology from the ground up.
Infor BI hides the technology under the hood and provides a set of user-friendly applications for IT administrators to gain full control and customise data and reporting at the interface level. By utilising Infor BI with OLAP built in, an IT administrator can:
- design and organise a dimension into any hierarchy based on organisational’s management structure,
- customise data cube based on organisational’s management structure,
- and query data from the data cube using Excel-like formulas without any complex programming required.
Big data and managing big data in the hotel industry are no doubt the new future that every corporation needs to face in order to provide personalised services to customers, improve customer satisfaction, and stay competitive.
Because of the exponential growth in volume, velocity, and variety of data in the hospitality industry, the technology behind it needs to be both fast and user-friendly. Multi-dimensional database, or OLAP is obviously the way to go with. Infor BI and Infor EPM are designed with these goals from the ground up and also offer financial controllers and CFOs powerful features to handle finance at the corporate level, which will be addressed in upcoming blog posts.
You can also request an Infor EPM demo today and see what it can do for your business.
