RPA Case Study: Automation in the Hospitality Industry

CLIENT PROFILE

Founded in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca (Spain), Meliá Hotels International is one of the largest hotel companies worldwide and the leader within the Spanish market, with more than 380 hotels throughout more than 40 countries and four continents. Meliá operates under the brands Gran Meliá Hotels & Resorts, Paradisus by Meliá, ME by Meliá, Meliá Hotels & Resorts, INNSIDE by Meliá, Sol by Meliá, and TRYP by Wyndham. The strategic focus on international growth has allowed Meliá to be the first Spanish hotel company with presence in key markets such as China, the Arabian Gulf and the US, as well as maintaining its leadership in traditional markets such as Europe, Latin America or the Caribbean.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

With an aggressive growth plan in the Americas, coupled with the need to provide greater operational visibility to Hotel Operations Managers, Melia Finance Management determined that they needed a cost-effective and efficient way to deliver accurate, daily and timely management reporting to each Hotel Operator in order to help them manage their business operations more proactively and achieve their financial goals.

If done manually, the creation of these daily reports would be very time-consuming and prone to errors as it would require the compilation and analysis of data from multiple sources and systems (6 different reports from each POS system at each hotel location).

Since the company did not want to heavily invest in an expensive Business Intelligence IT initiative, they had initially considered outsourcing the preparation of these reports to an offshore provider in a different time zone so they could have the reports readily available by 9:00 am local time.

SOLUTION

The Power of combining BI + RPA

Auxis was brought in to quickly assess the process and system environment, and provide an educated recommendation on the best way to obtain these daily management reports.

After reviewing the business requirements that the management team had in mind, Auxis was able to propose an innovative solution that combined Business Intelligence (PowerBI) and RPA (UiPath) to automate the creation and distribution of these daily reports.

The daily report includes multiple relevant performance metrics such as revenue vs. forecast, no shows, occupancy, average night spend, etc.

“Savings were the consequence, not the goal. RPA didn’t mean to simply automate what a human was doing. It meant to perform a complete reengineering of the process, eliminating inefficiencies and exploding the potential of rethinking the way we did things from scratch and without restrictions.”

Antonio Baez
Regional Administration Director, Americas
Melia Hotels International

Auxis’ Analytics and RPA team successfully architected, designed, and implemented a data warehouse and visualization solution using Microsoft PowerBI, as well as an unattended robot, built on the UiPath platform, to extract the data from each property, update the PowerBI reporting tool, and issue the daily report by 9:00 am each morning.

The UiPath robot was configured to perform the following tasks:

	Daily download of operational data from each property’s POS system (Opera).
	Data validation and adjustment to ensure consistency and comparability between properties
	Data upload to SQL Server and update of PowerBI reports.
	Daily distribution of the BI daily report to each property manager as well as Melia leadership team via e-mail.

RESULTS

The process was successfully automated within the estimated 8-week timeframe for the first wave of five (5) hotel locations that were included in the Proof of Concept (POC). Given the great success, Melia and Auxis are now in the process of rolling out this report to all of the hotels globally.

Key benefits achieved so far included:

	Significantly improved the operational visibility of both the Hotel Managers and the Americas’ Finance Management Team.
	In terms of ROI, since these reports were not available before, the client refers to the business case as “priceless".
	By comparing the level of effort that it would have taken a team to manually compile and produce these reports for the 5 properties in scope, the efficiency gains were estimated to be over 500%.

In addition to the design and implementation of the robot, Auxis is providing ongoing maintenance and infrastructure support of the RPA UiPath and PowerBI environment through its RPA Managed Services Offering from its Nearshore Center in Costa Rica.

“We chose Auxis because there was something very unique about them. Many consulting firms talk about what makes them different but very few really deliver what they promise. Auxis has been a loyal travel companion, not a consultant. Since the beginning they have been deeply involved in the project and have taken it on as if it was their own. They gave us the same dedication and attention when we were small as they do now that we are about to launch our RPA initiatives broadly across all the Americas and the globe.”

Antonio Baez
Regional Administration Director, Americas
Melia Hotels International

Besides the daily management report, Melia and Auxis are in the process of identifying and implementing multiple other automation opportunities across the organization, including the preparation of Credit Card and Bank Reconciliations, Revenue Audit Reporting, among many others.

To learn more about Auxis RPA solutions, please visit our page.