Kempinski Hotels drives business insight and decision-making with Infor EPM

Kempinski serves guests around the world 24 hours a day, which means its hotel employees must be able to transact with the system at any time. Kempinski chose Infor Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) as its budgeting and forecasting software system to empower hotel staff and provide them an extremely easy-to-use tool that's always available in the cloud.

With strong adoption and adherence to the hospitality industry standard for financial reporting (11th Edition of the Uniform System of Accounts for Lodging Industry), Kempinski has streamlined crucial processes, such as month-end and annual closing, and drafting of the annual or five-year business plan.

Business objectives for hospitality financials

Kempinski's business goals were twofold:

• Ensure accurate financial decisions can be made in any location at any time on any device.
• Cost effectively scale access to business intelligence, increase accuracy and granularity of financial forecasts, and avoid frequent hardware refreshes during a period of rapid growth.

Chief finance officer Colin Lubbe explains the company's approach:

"My focus is on ensuring our highly professional finance specialists can be true business enablers and support accurate decision-making and resources planning in the hotels we operate. To achieve this, we needed to introduce high performance financial reporting services and take these into the cloud. Today, I'm pleased that Kempinski can ensure that accurate financial decisions can be made round the clock, anywhere in the world, on any device."

How Kempinski implemented Infor EPM in their business

Since the initial roll out, use of the system has expanded from 2 to 9 users per hotel, including each hotel's financial controllers and department heads, as well as regional and corporate staff. Kempinski has placed focus on eliminating manual data entry by automated processing so that the reporting teams can focus on strategy and analysis, instead of just providing data. This, along with the expansion of users at the hotels, has been the key to increasing the quality and accuracy of financial forecasts.

Senior Director of Finance Systems & Analytics at Kempinski, Zsolt Pinter explains the value of the EPM solution:

'With Infor EPM we have been able to define strict reporting standards yet have also entirely customized Kempinski's reporting environment. This improves the user experience and drives efficiency."

Integrating business data for more transparent financial reporting

Kempinski integrates hotel data into worldwide and regional hotel reporting to create beautifully designed and strictly compliant financial statements that are an important selling point for hotel owners. The integration allows effective analysis of financial results and better management decision making supporting the group's long-term strategy.

With Infor EPM, the hotel results flow directly into corporate financial reporting, which ensures transparency and easy reconciliations. Both the hotel and corporate modules share the same look and feel and are accessible through the same easy to use web-based interface. Infor's innovative cloud technologies, which work seamlessly with the world-class capabilities of AWS® the scalability needed for a smoother upgrade process and ensures access to server capacity that matches the business' needs.

Gaining superior forecast accuracy

With the increased involvement of department heads in budgeting and forecasting processes, Kempinski gained superior forecast accuracy, which they believe improved by almost 90%. With Infor EPM the group is able to maintain rolling forecasts for each individual line item of their financial statements. I

In addition, Kempinski also enjoys prompt support for any ad-hoc requests and can rely on a result-oriented and cost- effective solution for larger projects with Infor Consulting Services.

The importance of partnership

Since we conducted this case study, our relationship with Kempinski has flourished. Infor is dedicated to contributing to success stories like this, including yours. Find out more about how we do that.