Hospitality reduces employee contact, improves operations

Ana Mata

July 16, 2020

Digital hospitality solutions are key to minimize face-to-face contact to deliver back-of-house services.

Welcome back to the final installment of our blog series focused on the hospitality industry in 2020 and beyond.

In the previous blog we talked about how to deal with guest-facing services in the new post-pandemic reality. Now it’s time to deal with the back-of-house (BOH) operations including: administration, finance, marketing, and housekeeping. The question is: How do we minimize face-to-face interactions between staff while keeping hotel operations running at the highest standard?

Since teleworking is generally not an option for hospitality workers, the alternative is to equip the staff within the hotel  with mobile devices and cloud-based applications, while at the same time enabling teleworking for those administrative employees who are able to work from home.

IDC is conducting a series of European IT Buyers Surveys to poll organizations about their digital investment plans, taking into account the impact of the pandemic. While cloud spending has shown strong growth compared to traditional software technologies over the last few years, 30% of the respondents think that they will see an even higher transformation to cloud due to the pandemic. And, consistent with other digital transformation trends, the health crisis is reinforcing the strategic role of cloud.

The hospitality industry is no stranger to the shift to the cloud but its adoption has been slow until now. Similar to other enterprises, some hotel systems must be always on to meet specific business needs, even during a total shutdown, such as the recent mandatory stay-at-home orders. This unprecedented situation has revealed just how difficult and complex it is to provide remote access and to keep many of the existing processes running.

Cloud benefits are twofold: It offers a solution for business continuity and cost containment in exceptional situations, as well, it can help  optimize operations and enable the introduction of new applications, with no financial risk. These factors should make cloud-based management solutions particularly advantageous for hotel operations. In fact, most PMS, CRM and business intelligence applications have cloud versions which can be accessed anytime and anywhere, require no on-site hardware and maintenance and are based on flexible Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription models. In the event of a partial or total hotel closure remote workers would be able to access operations that must be active at all times while the rest of the services could be reduced to a minimum or even stopped.

To make the most of cloud innovations, hotels need to provide the staff with mobile devices and mobile versions of applications. The team manager can then manage the housekeeping staff remotely and staff will have up-to-date information on the progress of tasks, as well as instant notification of new requests, anytime, anywhere on the property. Adding real-time channels such as chat, audio and video to the applications can increase staff efficiency by enabling direct communications between staff members, and between staff and guests. Personal contact will be reduced to a minimum while efficiency is maximized.

The hotel network must be able to provide high levels of mobility, quality of service (QoS) and security for hotel operations to run smoothly and seamlessly around the clock.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Digital Age Networking provides reliable, secure and versatile infrastructure with superior performance to support work from anywhere. The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch®  family and Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess® Stellar WLAN network portfolio delivers state-of-the-art capacity, security and reliability to deliver low-delay and high-bandwidth mobile applications for staff.

ALE also provides cloud-based services in a subscription model to help advance the wave of cloud adoption and innovation. With Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista® Cirrus Network Management as a Service, the cloud version of the ALE network management system, customers can manage their network remotely, even if it is fully distributed across multiple locations as is frequently the case for hotel chains and resorts. Other innovative solutions in the ALE networking portfolio, such as Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar Location-based Services (LBS) and Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking, are native cloud-based applications available in a subscription model.

In addition to network solutions, the ALE Cloud and Communications Business Division is strongly committed to cloud transformation.  With the integration ability provided by Alcatel-Lucent  Rainbow™ Communication Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) our customers can enrich their mobile applications with real-time communication channels. Or they can go one step further to streamline and optimize their digital business processes with customized services using Rainbow Workflow.

ALE networking provides an optimal foundation to deploy new services and enable digital business processes. With a solid strategy based on technological innovation and extensive experience ALE is helping hospitality industry customers’ prevail in these challenging times.