Rethinking RM's decision-support tools means first asking the right questions
A healthy organisation needs to question its analysis and decision-making tools. Can they identify abnormal situations? Can they distinguish structural trends from extraordinary or one-off situations? Can they isolate products, distribution channels and customer origins that are over- or under-performing? In short, are they precise enough to enable Sales or the RM team to adapt a tactical action plan, or even a strategic change?
There are many solutions on the market, and decision-makers are feeling lost. Who wouldn’t? Expensive or low-cost products, RMS, PMS, business intelligence tools, cloud or not? The jargon is deliberately too technical, whereas the needs and the means of meeting them are easy if the company has the right support.
Essential support to set the record straight
Launching an invitation to tender and receiving proposals from suppliers is not the first step in launching your transformation. Each supplier will try to explain why their solution is the most effective, and the decision-makers will try to project themselves with it. However, this easy solution is not an effective solution.
On the contrary, the balance of power needs to be reversed. This means going back to the drawing board and working towards a global, integrated organisation.
For this transformation to be as efficient as possible, a complete diagnosis using a rigorous method must be followed in several stages:
- Clarification of budget objectives: what is the company’s expected growth and what are the key success factors?
- Identify key resources: which department should administer the future tool(s), using which data sources (Revenue Management, analytical team, IT department, level of experience and skills)?
- Diagnosis of the quality of the data available: how far can the available data take us and why (reservation system, web data, conversion call data, robustness of flows).
- Understanding the final objective of the new ecosystem: what is the ambition of interfacing all the decision-support tools (frequency of updates, productivity, automatic price set-up, opening of channels, closing of stays, etc.)? Should it be scalable or ready for immediate use? And how do you drive change in your teams and management?
These answers enable us to draw up a clear roadmap and to meet suppliers from a position of strength, or simply to decide to develop tools internally to improve efficiency.
This approach, essential though it is, requires hindsight, expertise and time. N&C can help you with this diagnosis, thanks to our expert consultants and developers.
Keywords: RM tools, RMS, PMS, call for tenders, diagnosis
