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Case Introduction A London stock listed hotel chain operates over 140 hotels in 19 countries around the world.In the hospitality industry, the competitive advantage mainly consists of two parts—cost and service. Procurement is the inevitable measure to control costs and enhance the competitiveness. An Internet based procurement system that will help them to lower purchase costs on products and services, streamline procurement activities, improve operational efficiency. Challenge ■ How to purchase from predefined suppliers? ■ How to improve warehouse Management and Safety stock alert? ■ How to strengthen budget control ? ■ How to cause the financial data seamless connection? ■ How to manage hotels‘ purchasing centralize? Implementation To take on this challenge, the hotel chain relied on MetaSphere Procurement Systems (MPS). the group Head Quarter has contracted MetaSphere to build its own global procurement system that will support over five hundred concurrent users with the capability of processing more than 1,000,000 orders per year when it is in full production. the MPS U.K. Project began from March, 2008 to Feb. 2009. Presently the first stage of the program has finished, with the system covering all the Millennium hotels in U.K. At the same time，our collaboration with the group’s branch in U.S.A. and Singapore is now in progress. Results ■ Centralizing Operation MPS centralized suppliers and purchase orders, and that makes the purchase procedures unified, ensures quality of supplier control and monitor purchase price transparency. ■ Reduced Costs Budget control and approval of MPS Purchasing Request (PR) module enables the hotel CFO to track transactions against corresponding budgets and terminate a document's cycle if the defined budget conditions are not met. Millennium Hotels can prevent a purchase order from being dispatched to a vendor if there are insufficient funds in the related budget to support it. ■ Improving Efficiency MPS reduces workload for the staff and offers flexible modules and new features, which enable staff to improve their work efficiency. As MPS provides interface for Millennium’s MGP, the staff in accounting dept do not need to spend time in completing invoices manually, these are all handled automatically. ■ System Performance After all the MPS go live, Metasphere provides maintenance personnel to ensure the system operating normally, and also optimize and monitor system performance. As a result, MetaSphere has helped the client to reduce its procurement costs by 30 per cent, which in-turn has improved financial controls. It was found that the personal efficiency of the purchaser had increased by using MPS. The number of hotels which each purchaser can work for increase from 1 to 5 Customer Feedback “MetaSphere solution helped us to unify the procurement activities across our properties in UK. Now we have centralized control of all purchasing activities from initial draft to supplier payment.” Chee Hwee Tan, VP Procurement, UK |
