Hotels group Carlson is cutting costs by reducing the number of business intelligence tools it is using, according to a

Hotels group Carlson is cutting costs by reducing the number of business intelligence tools it is using, according to a media report.

Published: 03 May 2006

Hotels group Carlson is cutting costs by reducing the number of business intelligence tools it is using, according to a media report.

The decision to go for lesser number of tools, cutting down on six different sets of business intelligence tools, was due to multiple systems and as a result requests for business reports were backing up.

According to ZDNet Asia, Robert Richards, director of Web technologies at Carlson Hospitality Worldwide, said he started the process of reducing the number of tools after deploying Information Builders’s Webfocus tools in June last year. He reportedly said, “We went with it because we were trying to eliminate costs around the support of business intelligence tools. We had six different ways of delivering information so we had quite a backlog of requests and we were able to reduce the backlog by 90 percent with this.”

“Individual managers had bought tools to fix specific business problems but this meant that if the same piece of information had to go out through all the different delivery mechanisms it would have to be rewritten a number of times--which could take days or even weeks,” added the report.

Richards reportedly said as there were six different tools, there was requirement of maintaining programming expertise and training and support and infrastructure, which came at a cost. “We are still doing the transition – we’ve removed half of the platforms with the other half [going] in the next year,” he said.

The company now has 8,000 users for its portal which provides information to managers at its 900 hotels.
And, although the business users might not see much difference behind the scenes, the company is saving money, according to the report. Richards added: “We’ve got these types of capabilities which the business doesn’t see but it decreases the cost because we have less reports to manage.”

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