Analytical RMS SaaS product for hoteliers
Depending on who, when, for how long, individually or in a group and through which channel they want to book – the price is different.
Similarly to airlines, hotels use a dynamic and continuous optimal price and availability calculation for their services.
Price is influenced by many factors – the season, current occupancy, time distance to realization, competition context, external factors such as conferences or events and many more.
To make the right decision, the Revenue Manager must constantly analyze various factors manually or use a tool that automates these processes and supports decision making – the RMS system.
For a company Qualpro,
we created a product - proRMS.
proRMS is a specialized analytical system supporting the decision making of hotel price policy decision makers
The system loads data from many sources (PMS systems, channel managers, competitor information, accounting systems, POSs etc.) and continuously processes, calculating optimal price and availability of products, pricing group inquiries or predicting future hotel occupancy.
Additionally it offers a set of advanced real-time analytics tools enabling in-depth analysis of the hotel situation in various aspects, trends and customer behavior research.
The creation of the product was associated with many challenges, especially having time constraints and high substantive and technical complexity of the system.
Implementation
Organizational challenge
The system had to be productive within 12 months and required aligning a variety of roles: industry analysts, data scientists, big data specialists, developers, quality assurance, infrastructure engineers and managers. In total, over 30 people divided into 4 independent teams cooperating in scrum-of-scrums methodology.
Qualitative challenges
Namely continuously providing new functionalities in a stable production environment. We have implemented a multi-stage quality control system covering developers, testers, automated module tests, performance and user interface tests. The whole is managed by Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery solutions enabling delivery at any time without the risk of system unavailability or malfunction.
Domain knowledge challenges
Revenue management in hotels is a sophisticated process with complex data structures and industry-specific knowledge. Engaging the rights analysts and the right processes in the whole development cycle was key. It helped us optimally convey specific and complex domain knowledge to the technical team, therefore saving time and getting the job done.
A technological challenge
Managing and analyzing unstructured data from dozens of sources, while maintaining flexible communication was a challenge. The project required us to develop mathematical data processing models in accordance with industry guidelines. Additionally, flexibility of data mining for various visualizations was considered a must have. Not to forget about large data volumes, speed and a high stability requirements…
We leveraged dozens of the latest technologies to meet these requirements. The architecture is based on microservices, components from Google, Facebook or Twitter. The knowledge and experience of our teams combined with strong workflow organization allowed us to fulfill all goals.
Production challenges
The goal of the project was not only the software itself, but also designing and implementing a production infrastructure that will ensure the service’s stability and availability.
We have developed hardware requirements, a full monitoring system, backup and restore procedures, incident handling, implementation of subsequent versions and functionalities, as well as data migration. We supported the implementation at Hilton and Accor chains as well as smaller hotel chains and units. We will be supporting further development and system maintenance in a continuous manner.
We successfully implemented a fully functioning system as intended: within 11 months of project launch. Implementation support in subsequent hotels, further development and system operation became Qualpro's main service.
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