Hyatt Merges Financial, Ops DataHyatt Merges Financial, Ops Data

The suggestions made by Barkat and his team eventually led Hyperion to make some alterations to their core product offering. The sluggish response time arose because of the way Hyatt wanted the dashboard interface to navigate: Instead of System 9's original paging point-of-view capability, Hyatt wanted a single set of drop-down menus across the top of the interface to control four pages at once and, thereby, access both operational and financial data simultaneously. In other words, the company wanted the menus to access individual hotel performance and their key metrics (occupancy, room rates, etc.) along with budgeting scenario data and sales forecasts for the whole company and its subsidiary units.

This made integrating the interface with all those data sources something of a challenge -- "logistical concerns" in Barkat's words. Hyatt ended up using a data warehouse from Teradata to cleanse operational information coming from the de-centralized ERP systems of Hyatt's individual hotels around the world. The company also uses the warehouse to store and cleanse external marketing data, such as what the competition is up to, or market share in each region. On the financial side, other sources include the proprietary company's general ledger system and an Oracle database -- systems already consolidated and unified through Hyatt's original performance management outlay.

The next step will be to deliver the dashboards to between 500 and 600 users at Hyatt -- all the way down to the regional manager level. The full-blown operational BI roll-out, which will target around 3,000 users, won't occur until 2007, says Barkat. So far, in these early stages, Barkat hasn't been able to quantify the results of System 9 with any real figures. But, he says, users have been providing feedback on metrics, which, to him, indicates a strong "cultural and business adaptation" among Hyatt's executive class.