|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
 Case Studies 
Hotel Hershey Case Study The town of Hershey began as a planned community that was built by Milton and Catherine Hershey in the early 1900's. The community developed as a result of the thriving Hershey chocolate factory and confectionaries. Milton Hershey, a philanthropist at heart, built the Milton Hershey School which provides education to 1200 to 1500 children per year with 100% of the costs subsidized by the Hershey Trust; established by the Hershey's in the mid-1920's. This Trust, which is funded by the revenues from the Hershey properties, continues to fund 100% of the costs of the school. The Hotel Hershey is one of several magnificent resorts located in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Milton Hershey built the exquisite Hotel Hershey during the great depression in memory of his wife. Today the Hotel Hershey is a Mobil Award winning, four-star hotel with 249 rooms, extensive meeting spaces, with a convention center and additional recreational facilities nearby. Given the Hotel's luxurious accommodations and amenities, it became a great attraction for families and travelers and continues to be a "must see" resort and town. Due to this, the Hotel Hershey was presented with some challenges with maintaining all sources of revenue, especially their telecom revenue. Hotel Hershey's Early Telecom Dilemma: Hotel Hershey had a stand-alone PC communications accounting solution supporting two hotels on one AS/400. This stand-alone PC interfaced with their AS/400 based property management system through a serial connection posting to the property management system. Over time, this proved to be a faulty and inconsistent solution. As a result, the revenue per room was dropping and the Hotel was failing to meet their projected telephone revenue per month and found they were losing call records. After investigating the situation, Darrin Pinkham, Director of Information Services at the Hotel Hershey, determined that the Hotel needed to find an integrated solution that could directly co-reside on their current AS/400 network and post directly to their property management system while also eliminating the serial connections, interfaces and stand-alone PC. The Hotel was also interested in the ability to eventually centralize their communications accounting systems onto one AS/400 network. Since revenue and profits are extremely important for the Hotel Hershey and the Milton Hershey School, the Hotel chose SDD's TCM/400 communications accounting solution. TCM/400 co-resides on the AS/400 and feeds data directly to the PMS. TCM/400 is a tightly integrated and scalable AS/400 solution that supports a centralized solution. Hotel Hershey's Telecom Solution: Initially, Hotel Hershey chose to test SDD's TCM/400 communications accounting system in a parallel test running the TCM/400 communications accounting software on their AS/400. During the parallel test they found that more calls were being captured with TCM/400. To be certain, Darrin crosschecked the data against his existing stand-alone communications accounting system. Darrin believes that this increase in revenue was "due to the tight integration between TCM/400 and their AS/400 PMS and elimination of the serial interface, resulting in more calls being processed and posted." As a result of the parallel test with TCM/400, the Hotel Hershey purchased SDD's TCM/400 communications accounting system and installed it immediately on their AS/400 at their Hotel. Darrin Pinkham found "that within the first month their telecom revenue alone showed a 25% to 30% increase". Per Darrin Pinkham, "revenues continue to climb and the Hotel has continued to meet its telecom revenue projections". Darrin Pinkham was so impressed with the results at the Hotel he installed TCM/400 at another property on a separate AS/400 network. Going forward, Darrin intends to move to a centralized solution where all of the Hershey properties will run on one centralized AS/400 network. SDD's TCM/400 is scalable and fully supports a centralized communications accounting solution. |
| ||
| |||
| Copyright © 2007 Systems Design & Development, Inc. All rights reserved. Legal Notices and Terms of Use |
