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The hospitality, leisure, gaming and integrated resorts industry evolves and grows quickly. Today, some of the sector's significant challenges include sustaining the rapid growth experienced after the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting to the rapidly evolving regulatory environment as it relates to sports betting (for gaming), and meeting consumer entertainment preferences to remain competitive. That’s why, over the last five years, many top brands have been betting on cloud-based technology to modernize back-office operations and unleash growth. In fact, this is true outside of the hospitality and gaming industry. A recent PwC survey with CEOs worldwide found that 76% of them are investing in technology to reinvent themselves for the future.
So how do cloud-based innovative tools benefit hospitality and gaming businesses? To help understand the business outcomes, let’s dive into five critical business functions that have been attracting cloud investments:
1. Financial reporting
The industry is known for its high-volume and fast-paced decision-making across functions. To support that, having the ability to access real-time data can be the key for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). It can make or break a brand. Imagine trying to consolidate financial reports across multiple brands while relying on disparate technology systems. This was one casino’s main pain point. As a global powerhouse with several lines of business, the company has a complex business structure, but they were unable to access financial information in real-time from its numerous businesses and systems, which hindered their business efficiency and ability to grow. The organization needed a scalable solution to help bring the scattered data into one platform, gain greater visibility to inform decision-making, and modernize finance processes.
To help overcome this challenge, the company built a flexible cloud platform that provides real-time data to employees across functions, empowers end-users with self-service access to data and reports, and drives business efficiencies.
Another brand, a large regional casino, faced a different — yet common — challenge with multiple customizations and non-standard processes. An outdated financial system and manual processes limited their financial team’s ability to integrate various POS systems and report financials. The excessive customizations resulted in increased cost of IT support and inefficiencies. By adopting Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the company improved controls and streamlined processes as a result of a stronger project management support, change management and training for a successful implementation.
2. Food and beverage supply chain management
Stepping out of the C-suite and into the restaurant kitchen: Earlier available insights can also be crucial for chefs and managers at restaurants and bars. Managing food and beverage at various outlets (restaurants, production kitchens, bars, etc.) is quite challenging, with little room for error. Several factors contribute to this complexity — including daily orders from vendors, small warehouse space, and quick turns — and require confidence and simplicity in the ordering capability. To help improve this process, many industry leading organizations are taking a two-pronged approach:
To help provide ease of use across the food and beverage supply chain, companies are looking to implement Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) to provide stronger functionality for planning, ordering, and reporting. The increased data visibility with Oracle Cloud SCM offers the ability to place orders with real-time data. From a financial perspective, the transactions integrated from multiple point-of-sale systems into Oracle’s Financial Accounting Hub give the management team insight into the various transactions at property level, restaurant level, and venue level.
As a part of this implementation, PwC leverages their hospitality and gaming model system approach, which includes a hospitality order orchestration solution built on Oracle and designed to help integrate and simplify procurement and inventory management for food and beverage ordering. Leveraging extensive industry knowledge and Oracle technology, this tool can help simplify the front-end to allow users (including chefs, restaurant managers and service employees) to access the information required to effectively check inventory, process orders, execute transfers, and manage their business. This tool provides end-users with an interface to help perform transactions related to inventory, cost transfers, purchases, and inventory return requests. The screen incorporates auto-sourcing logic, which enables users to request items from a supplier or warehouse depending on item availability and priority. It is also available as a mobile solution.
The integrated Oracle solution employs centralized accounting logic across properties, allowing for efficient accounting while also creating financial information that can be used to help inform and improve operations. As this recent Forbes article points out, an integrated solution can help simplify the ability to bring information together into meaningful analysis utilizing the Oracle tools.
One additional benefit lies in the fact that Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite deploys continuous updates and new capabilities, allowing organizations to grow as the product advances and the needs become more complex. As the organization expands the volume of data in its cloud environment, the SaaS vendor can monitor performance and expand the memory or processing capabilities.
3. Human capital management
Down the Las Vegas strip, another resort’s challenges came from disparate human capital management (HCM) systems. The company owns and operates dozens of properties with help from thousands of employees. Like many hospitality and gaming brands, they grew through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and this resulted in numerous independent fiefdoms, data silos, and high operational costs. But with future business growth plans, they realized the need to simplify and standardize their approach to HR and talent management.
Determined to change the cards they were dealt, they migrated to a centralized platform for core human resources (HR) operations and laid the foundation to support future strategic M&A growth. They invested in Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), which increased capacity to deploy new capabilities in HR, and eliminated disparate legacy systems that represented high IT operational costs, manual processes and forms that required significant effort to maintain year-over-year.
With this foundation in place, they had a much easier process incorporating the additional data and employees that came with the acquisition of two new companies, and also in opening two new properties. Oracle Cloud HCM afforded the company this meaningful flexibility to allow for new departments, new revenue streams, new sectors of human capital managed by a single integrated platform.
Organizations face a steep climb after an M&A transaction across functions, and this can be particularly hard in human resources. CHROs often need to migrate several thousands of employees from the acquired organization and this can be a difficult task.
The Las Vegas entity had to prioritize system integration, which meant moving HCM and ERP functions from disparate legacy systems to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.
The company migrated thousands of active employees to the cloud around the world and into their payrolls; re-implemented legacy and acquired absence plans; re-implemented approval flows; harmonized employee grades and jobs, implemented a new salary band structure; designed a U.S. pilot as the first step towards the adoption of Oracle Journeys, expanded user base of their recruiting/onboarding environment as an interim solution; deployed talent management enhancements; deployed workforce compensation enhancements; enabled new tools; prepared detailed process; and upskilled their workforce. As it continues to expand, the new HCM platform allows the organization to integrate employees quickly and easily.
4. Employee and customer experience
A key aspect of staying competitive is the ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience, and it is undeniable how employee experience can impact the bottom line. By moving away from manual paper processes and embracing automation, the company immediately saw improved employee experience, efficiencies and data accuracy.
Ultimately, it’s about prioritizing efforts. In today’s competitive hospitality market, staff should focus on delivering exceptional customer experience (CX); not on managing a hodge-podge of on-prem manual spreadsheets, for example. The more an organization can automate data processing and reporting, the better it can fulfill its mission to help deliver rewarding experiences for its customers.
Oracle Fusion Applications provides self-service access to data and reports. These changes are enhancing decision-making and CX across core functions. In addition, Oracle Fusion Applications’ updates are scheduled regularly and translate to decreased disruption for the organization and gives employees the opportunity to advance with the system by continually upskilling in conjunction with the updates.
5. Compliance and controls
With daily cyber threats and customer data protection concerns, the hospitality and gaming industry is constantly exposed to potential security threats. That’s why industry COOs and controllers are increasingly making the case that an overhaul of its ERP system should include special attention to risks and controls.
Oracle Risk Management & Compliance can play a key role in helping hospitality and gaming enterprises address regulatory requirements and compliance challenges as part of their ERP journey. Organizations are leveraging Risk Management to tighten controls, meet regulatory trends, enhance customer data protection, and provide the right data access to the right employees based on their roles.
This solution’s continuous monitoring and controls enhanced internal control environments while lowering operational costs and future-proofing the business. With the right tools, hospitality and gaming industry leaders can automate data gathering and reconciliation, enhancing risk mitigation and compliance — including consumer data privacy requirements — across functions.
Playing the right cards in five key business functions
In a tight market, cloud-based systems that can drive efficiencies and modernize processes create an unseen advantage to turn the table and win the game. Many industry leaders have already taken the steps to streamline operations, protect customer data, and future-enable growth. By adopting industry-specific solutions around Oracle Fusion Applications, they can move away from manually intensive tasks that are costly and inefficient while allowing rapid data integration.
The result includes lower operational costs, enhanced risk management and compliance, increased decision-making through real-time supply chain management data, better customer analytics, streamlined reporting which can help inform potential acquisitions, and faster M&A data and process integration.
Through our alliance with Oracle, PwC applies industry leading cloud solutions to propel some of the industry’s largest players and help them capture tangible results. We rely on hospitality and gaming industry benchmarks, target operating models, and pre-configured Oracle systems to help accelerate transformation and help drive industry leading practices. As an alliance collaborator, we apply our deep industry and tech knowledge to our client’s specific challenges to drive lasting transformation. Learn more about the PwC and Oracle Alliance.
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