The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa, an exclusive Houston urban resort, is one of the finest hotels and membership clubs combining first-class comfort and casual elegance. This classic Houston hotel presents an array of offerings and amenities designed to offer guests and members an experience unlike any other.

Challenge: The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa is a leader in providing the ultimate experience and service to their members and guests. With multiple locations, types of memberships, and a wide range of offerings, it was a challenge to maintain a single-entity view for flawless operations and optimal service delivery. The Houstonian wanted their members to feel they were a part of a unified entity across all the various service offerings, and be able to appropriately and immediately respond to any guest or member’s need. The impact of the business’s dependence on “best-of-breed,” separate systems with separate and possibly inconsistent member data, often leaves even the best-run hospitality enterprise without a comprehensive, unified view of its business operations. Beyond customer satisfaction, operations and profitability can also be greatly improved by the ability to capture, monitor, analyze, and act on well aligned cross-functional information. Comparing financial performances across departments and services is paramount for an efficient operation.

Stone Bond’s Solution: The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa uses Stone Bond’s Enterprise Enabler® (EE) to tie together all its systems, from the myriad membership databases to multiple point–of-sale systems. With Enterprise Enabler coordinating information flow and availability behind the scenes, employees can conveniently address all the members’ needs across all the services and locations.

EE is being used to integrate membership data among Abacus, the central membership management system, SpaSoft, the spa management application, and Micros, the restaurant and gift shop point-of-sale systems. EE connects membership data among multiple separate systems that serve members. For example, a member can charge to his account at both the hotel and spa, without creating a situation where the spa’s database is out-of-sync with the membership database. EE moves membership transaction data immediately from one system to the next, creating a seamless experience for the members as well as for the business operations.

Financial data also moves through EE from all these applications, into a central financial analysis package called Opera, and from there into Solomon, The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa’s General Ledger package. EE is also used to extract data from ADP’s eTime system, to provide daily labor flash reports. The hospitality business is driven on daily analysis of its performance, unlike some businesses that only look at monthly or even quarterly results. With the implementation of EE at The Houstonian, ultimately, all sales-related data from all applications, supporting hotel, restaurant, gift shops, health club, and spa, are funneled to a single financial application, providing a comprehensive view of The Houstonian’s financial performance.

Benefits: Now, with Enterprise Enabler and its visual workflow, not only are all the data flows among applications documented, they are secure, auditable and constantly monitored. EE provides email notifications upon detecting an error such as a missing data file or upon any conditions such as reaching a new record of membership activity during a day. Thus, the IT department is systematically alerted of problems and milestones instead of being warned by other employees, after the fact, that something is missing or incorrect.

EE has proven to be a reliable ally in unifying The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa’s enterprise systems. Development of data connections among systems requires very little programming time, and the resulting connections, maps, and workflows are completely self-documenting and can be reused for other data flows. As a result, The Houstonian’s Information Technology Management has a considerable comfort level in their ability to see, monitor, and review all data flows under their watch. The Houstonian’s business team is well-served with a unified view of all their numbers. Members feel continuity across all facilities and services at all locations, no longer having the sense that they belong to several different systems, but that they belong to a cohesive organization known as The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa.