Surviving
in a Sea of Unmanageable DataBy Cindy Estis Green
Hotel managers can find themselves adrift in a sea of data. What is happening in the business? What data is worth keeping? What statistics are worth tracking?
To paraphrase management guru Peter Drucker, "Data is not information; it is information's ore." In order to use data, it needs to be organized for a task and applied to a decision.
These tips will help you sharpen your business' decision making tools.
Create a wish list of the types of information you need by department.
Make a list for payroll, business development, yield management and inventory control, for example. You may want to track what you spend on staffing relative to what you receive in revenue in your restaurants, or identify which feeder cities produce revenue in your key market segments.
Decide what data is clean and available.
If guest home addresses are not captured at the time of reservation or at check - in, you will not have accurate information on what cities are producing business for you. You may need to review the processes in the department that collects the information.
Often, it is the front office and reservations that collects marketing information, although it is the sales and marketing department that uses it. Like wise, it may be food and beverage outlets that collect the payroll and revenue statistics, and the accounting department that analyzes the staffing levels.
The various departments must become partners in the data collection and analysis effort to ensure that the data is available in usable form.
Match up your wish list of information with the related data available.
Make a list of information your want, write next to each item the corresponding data sources.
Your wish list can be designed in a brainstorming session with you key
management team. Then take one item at a time and be sure you have
a source to generate that piece of
information.
Narrow the wish list to the top 10 pieces of information for each department.
Set priorities based on what information will help you improve revenue significantly or reduce and control expenses. Ask each department head to consider what information is known.
For inventory control, it may be essential to track usage levels for housekeeping supplies on a per occupied room basis. This information could be critical to controlling supply costs. It might be nice, but not necessary to rack price changes per month on each individual item.
Establish the data collection process by department.
Review each of the top information needs and its source data with each department head. Determine obstacles to collection clean data for each department and establish any systems and procedures that would be needed to ensure that the data is available and consistent.
For example, the reservation manager may need to establish a means for collecting pickup of new reservations for each of the next 60 days. The data may be available, but a system to store it on a regular basis may have to be created. Off the shelf spreadsheets are ideal for this purpose.
Monitor results based on information selected. Once every department
is collecting the selected types of information, it is necessary
to review how it is helping in revenue enhancement or cost savings.
Data needs to be check for accuracy and consistency and the information
needs to be checked for overall value to the property's profit goals.
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