Starwood Hotels Accomodates HR Users With Operational Reporting System

PDF Download free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

	SNAPSHOT Organization: Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., one of the world's leading hotel and leisure companies. Challenge: Create operational reports from numerous data sources to serve authorized users based on appropriate security and access protocols at numerous properties worldwide; improve the accuracy and timeliness of HR information; standardize HR reporting across a diverse enterprise. Strategy: Web-enable processes and management with a single operational business intelligence system that pulls production HR data into a data warehouse throughout the day and allows self-service reporting via standard Web browsers. Results: Web-enable processes and management with a single operational business intelligence system that pulls production HR data into a data warehouse throughout the day and allows self-service reporting via standard Web browsers. Information Builders Solution: WebFOCUS, Consulting, and Education.

WebFOCUS Provides a "Suite Upgrade" for Leading Hotel and Leisure Company

With 110,000 employees at more than 750 properties in more than 80 countries, Starwood Hotels & Resorts faces a five-star challenge managing human resources (HR) information. For Bob Thomas, senior technical manager at Starwood, keeping HR business processes running smoothly has been largely a matter of having the right business intelligence tools for the job – and making current data accessible to authorized users. Thomas and a relatively small IT staff at Starwood recently deployed Information Builders' WebFOCUS to augment their SAP suite of applications, and the results are accommodating HR professionals worldwide.

"WebFOCUS has let our users around the world access current information via the Web with accurate results and easy-to-use functionality," Thomas says. "Having a consolidated reporting system and a single interface to manage HR data has increased our productivity at all levels."

The productivity boosts are largely a matter of reducing manual labor. Previously, every property throughout Starwood's global enterprise collected HR information on spreadsheets and mailed them to corporate headquarters. Now, personnel information is extracted from SAP production data many times daily to refresh an Oracle data warehouse. WebFOCUS is used to generate custom reports from the Oracle data on demand.

"Any change in personnel, such as a department transfer, is transmitted through the payroll system and we get that information the same day," Thomas explains. "Our data is more accurate, and it takes less effort to get the information we need."

Checking Out the Reporting Options

As one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world, Starwood is a fully integrated owner, operator, and franchisor of hotels and resorts including St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, Four Points by Sheraton, and W brands, as well as Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high-quality vacation interval ownership resorts.

For this large and diverse enterprise, implementing SAP R/3 was the catalyst that sparked the search for a new reporting tool. SAP delivered the capabilities Starwood lacked in its HR processes, but when it came to having comprehensive technology for company-wide reporting, the "vacancy" sign was still flashing.

"When we first deployed SAP, we knew the reporting side was a bit weak," Thomas admits. "It has an internal reporting tree that is useful for standard reporting, but it didn't satisfy our need for things like ad hoc capabilities." Starwood had several in-house reporting options to choose from. Starwood's HRIS department determined that WebFOCUS met the company's requirements for a dashboard-driven, Web-based, self-service reporting system. As an enterprise business intelligence suite, WebFOCUS satisfies myriad reporting, analysis, and information-delivery needs for users throughout an extended enterprise. Its robust architecture can scale to meet the needs of an unlimited number of users while delivering consistent, efficient performance.

"We had used Information Builders' FOCUS in the past and were well acquainted with its powerful capabilities," says Starwood HRIS Director Pete Chuhran. "We were interested in adding a GUI front-end that could enable Web-based reporting with a low learning curve. WebFOCUS met these needs and was backed by Information Builders' great reputation, which I have come to trust over the years. We also liked WebFOCUS' unique ability to access information from many diverse data sources."

Information Builders' Consulting was called in to assist with the original WebFOCUS deployment, and has also helped with subsequent upgrades. "We have dealt with a lot of software vendors," Thomas says. "We have a good rapport with Information Builders' personnel – they are willing to work with us, and they respond quickly to our needs."

Starwood also took advantage of Information Builders' education classes. "The classes were helpful for our administrators," Thomas continues. "However, WebFOCUS is so easy to use that most of our end users can pick it up without any training."

Upgrading the Infrastructure

Using the WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard and WebFOCUS Managed Reporting, Thomas and his team created a secure business intelligence environment that allows users to access selected reports based on their roles and security access rights to particular data. WebFOCUS also interfaces with Starwood's own data-level security via the company portal. IT pros currently use WebFOCUS 5.3.2, which is installed on a Microsoft Windows 2003 server. It accesses HR data from an Oracle 9i Database, which is installed along with Oracle Application Server in a UNIX environment.

The WebFOCUS Managed Reporting environment made it easy to develop standard reports, set up domains for various properties and divisions, and manage the reporting infrastructure from a central location. The WebFOCUS Business Intelligence Dashboard is a thin-client front-end that gives users the ability to control and organize how reports are delivered to the desktop. Users can select the logo, colors, composition, and reports to be shown in a dashboard view. This allows each Starwood property to include its own corporate logo and colors in their reports.

Additionally, through the dashboard, developers can set up a different interface for different people. For example, experienced analysts can drill down to the line-item detail, while casual users utilize a higher-level format that walks them through a step-by-step reporting process. Authorized users can build content pages that organize how reports are delivered to their own dashboard view. In addition, they can put reports into a list of favorites that may appear on a banner link or be displayed right in the dashboard main page.

A Concierge for HR Information

WebFOCUS has become Starwood's standard reporting interface to display nearly all HR information. According to Thomas, most users have taken to the new system quickly. "There is a very low learning curve for running the reports, even though we give them four or five dimensions to pick and choose from," he notes. "They are rotating the data and taking advantage of the options WebFOCUS offers for customizing the reports. WebFOCUS gives them plenty of options for parametric input, yet it is a lot easier to use than a sophisticated OLAP tool."

Currently, four people manage the HR reporting activities for 750 properties in 80 countries. Based on its success in HR, Starwood is examining the possibility of expanding the use of WebFOCUS to other departments within the organization.

No Reservations About the New System

These technical and business attributes make WebFOCUS ideal for calculating occupancy percentages, booking rates, customer preferences, guest satisfaction levels, and a host of other factors. "WebFOCUS is the perfect tool for this type of analysis, because it give users the flexibility to easily access, sort, summarize, display, and drill down into the data as they see fit," says Thomas. "We feel it is a superior reporting tool that could potentially replace some of our reporting systems from other vendors.

"WebFOCUS has given us what we need to do our jobs better," Thomas concludes. "That goes not only for my team, but for all the end users who access it. It is a very efficient front-end reporting tool for our SAP HR system, and we see the potential to propagate its benefits throughout the corporation."