ORACLE
a few years ago. It’s a back-office system that handles vital processes like invoicing, payments and the like. In Las Vegas, the D, Golden Gate and Circa are all using NetSuite. MGM is using Fusion, as is Caesars. SL: When MGM was looking at a financial solution, I remember talking to them about a year before they were going to make a decision, and our Cloud ERP team was talking with them. We had a great relationship already because of the hospitality side of things. Our ERP sales team took the MGM finance team up to Redwood Shores [Oracle HQ] and did a full day of workshopping on finances. I remember one of MGM’s key team members coming back and saying, “I was blown away with what you guys have done with financials, it’s unbelievable.” 12 months later, they moved in that direction. There is also a digital assistant part of this which is
integrated, and we’re looking at doing this on the hospitality side too. That also shows the overlap between our technologies.
“The trend we are seeing is the
explosion of the ecosystem. The reality is that we have very savvy digital guests that will expect more and more. You can do so much at home now, it’s almost ridiculous
that you have to go to the front desk with some requests – but you could do everything from your phone”
are hard coded on integration so you get one solution and that’s all you can do. With us there is much, much greater flexibility on the customization and integration side. Let’s take Circa for example. When we were talking to them about Stadium Swim, that was a big deal. The displays out there are phenomenal, it’s beautiful. Mobility was really important for them, with the guest experience, as was mobile payment. So, they have a mobile solution that integrates directly with Simphony, for in-room dining, and for the pool area. It means you can have all the menus displayed on a screen, whether it’s a server or you have the menu on your phone, and you can do integrated payments, credit card or room charge – that’s a huge deal. For customers who want to integrate mobile or go touchless, that’s more important than ever now and we have this working in the field with some tremendous customers.
CI: Is the ERP financial solution used by the same customers? LC: That’s one of the most well-known Oracle solutions, it’s a horizontal solution but a lot of our customers in hospitality use it. There are actually two of these, one is the Fusion ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] which larger customers use, and the other, for mid- to smaller-sized customers is the NetSuite ERP. That comes from another acquisition we made
26 JUNE 2021
CI: What does a digital assistant bring to this exactly? LC: You can talk to it in 20 different languages, and it can translate it for someone else, into their language, for example – it’s extremely intelligent, AI-driven. Customers use it for their guests in hospitality if they want to, for service requests or whatever. The technology is used in our applications, starting with the ERP ACM and now OPERA, and finally Simphony is adopting the same technology that employees will be using for doing their day-to-day operations or for getting statistics and reports from the back-end. On the hotel side, there are a couple of use cases that we
are working on. For example, housekeeping. They still dial 0 or whatever to notify they have cleaned a room, it’s archaic. Now you have a digital assistant, and they can input they have cleaned a room and it goes straight into the system from their device. Or it could be someone at the front desk and they’re using the digital assistant to check someone in, with the chat-bot offering you different options, asking if you want to check someone in and bringing up the information about the reservation. There are different solutions for the GM or the front desk manager, they can pull up the information about number of arrivals et cetera. The neat thing about it is that it has the capability to build
new skills very quickly, it’s something that is evolving with all of our solutions across Oracle, and it will allow everyone to do everything from their phone through a chat AI intelligent function that will automate some of the processes they have to go through.
CI: It’s a great example of how AI will impact hospitality. LC: It really is. Another is to think about a recommendation solution or engine. That could work in two ways – one, really automate processes. There are still many hotel processes that are very manual. Go to a hotel and you’re asking for a room. It can take the front desk person five minutes to assign the right room, and even then, it might not be the right room. Do they know you’re a VIP guest, do they assign you a room that’s been vacant for 72 hours if there are still virus issues? The way you can now apply AI on top of this means room assignment recommendation is possible. We know who the guest is, we know the hotel occupancy, the room rotation, we put all that intelligence in, and the agent doesn’t have to work anything out, the right room for the customer will be picked
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