INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY “A DRIVING FORCE IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY”

The word information technology itself communicates its importance for every business enterprise to perform and run their day to day activities efficiently and retain their customers in order to be in the market, effective and appropriate Information system has to be there.

Information system serves as the blood to the business operation to react, modify and prepare strategies to live in the market. Now a day, competition has become very tough and in the search of providing value for money to retain and gain the customer confidence, information technology plays a crucial role.

Many business enterprises are investing heavily on their strong information system to integrate all the functional department activities for exchanging and updating the data and information with the latest information technology called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system or SAP.

Hospitality industry that reflects its pleasant services to entertain and serve their exclusive world class facilities also rely on Information Technology or Information System.

Information system may be called as a set of devices, procedure and operating systems designed around user-based criteria to produce information and communicate it to the user for planning, controlling and performing.

Hospitality industry has set up strong information system and structure of Information that plays a role of CRM, that’s play, a backbone of serving all sort of information on customers that help the Industry to provide quality services.

CRM runs on the Data-Base that keeps all the information about the customers and can be accessed by all the terminals within all the functional departments to help them in up-sell and cross-sell and runs all the important measures to retain and give special attraction to their present customers over internet and intranet technology.

Hotel Industry has various ERP packages containing various functional applications like POS (Point of Sale), PMS (Property Management System) and MMS (Material Management System) which are inter-connected using LAN and any data and information from any departments can be accessed by any person within the organization. ERP also takes care of the security of data and information and provide secure connection and authentication by username and password.

It’s always comes in mind of every individual what is ERP Packages and SAP, and why these are gaining momentum? It’s obvious that management always require appropriate information and data to take any strategic move in respect to coping competition, and take day to day functional decision in various levels of the organization. And these requirements make ERP or SAP, a hero in corporate world.

ERP and SAP is a collection of various functional application solutions which require Information Technology to runs on various business requirements. It is important for management to investigate appropriate measures to configure ERP within their organizational structure and requirement because it requires huge investment and result to re-engineer business processes earlier they used to conduct.

If these Packages are wrongly installed and insignificant interest shown by the management in the implementation of ERP, it leads to the chaos for business enterprise. Hence management must invest on appropriate training to all levels of the organization employees and inform them about the usage and importance of ERP Packages in their day to day operations.

ERP Packages integrate all information technology like e-mail, internet & intranet framework, on-line access of data and information from any SAP module being in organization and outside organization, database Management System to store and manage systematic data fields and files and EDI(Electronic Data Interchange)modules for having faster processing and delivery of any business data between business partners.

To conclude, ERP and Information Technology makes the hotel industry proactive in serving their customers and constantly working on improving their functional performance to attract and to create strong market base.

“After all a satisfied customer doesn’t require any advertisement”.