How Atlas Hotels navigated a quickly-changing F&B environment with technology

During the pandemic, Atlas launched a development course for its operations managers called Evolve, which supported work on projects that would change the shape of the company in the years ahead.

Abs and Erica decided to focus their efforts on food and beverage because of their passion for this area of hospitality and their shared interest in identifying new opportunities to improve efficiency. “I’m always curious how we can do things better and make life easier for our team members,” Abs said. “Participating in Evolve put us in a strategic mindset, and we knew there was an opportunity to improve both efficiency and consistency.”

Challenged by legacy technology

The experience Abs and Erica had gathered by working in frontline operations and then leading operations teams made it clear a few things were holding them back when it came to their food and beverage technology.

Menu updates were time-consuming. Any changes required going through a planning process with data and purchasing teams to present a forecast of what they thought the changes would produce for the company. Meetings and data analysis were taking a long time and holding them back from operating at the speed they needed to.

Menu consistency was a challenge. “Our previous system couldn’t make updates centrally. For any menu addition or price change, we had to log onto 50 servers to update each of our 50 hotels individually,” Erica recalled. This process was not only laborious but risked errors. “If someone happened to enter incorrect VAT information at one property, for example, it might go unnoticed for days.”

The fact that the Atlas portfolio is made up of the same brand meant consistency was an important part of the brand experience. “We can’t have someone paying £5 for their pint and then going to another hotel and finding another price.”

The pandemic only heightened these challenges. They would work out agreements with suppliers and then hear last minute that due to supply chain issues a product was no longer available. Responding to these situations was complicated. They had to communicate with the data team and the data team needed to upload the change to every single POS individually. With more than 50 hotels, it was a big headache.

The Atlas team needed the agility to navigate an environment where product availability rapidly changed and needed to be rolled out to the properties, quickly.

A final challenge was central controls and management. “We needed to manage users and login information centrally with appropriate permissions - and that wasn’t possible before,” Erica said.

The search and selection process

Knowing a change was needed to the technology that powered their food and beverage program, Erica and Abs began working with their commercial director and data and IT teams to identify their needs, then began searching for the best solution on the market that would meet these requirements.

Infrasys quickly emerged as a leading contender. Besides meeting the needs described above, the Atlas team developed confidence in the ability to have a long-term partnership with Shiji.

“We want to make sure that our partners are a future fit for whatever our brand chooses to do both now and in the long term,” Abs said.

The Atlas team decided to move ahead and switch to Infrasys Cloud Point of Sale.

Recent research indicates more than 80% of hoteliers have experienced failed implementations. So what makes an implementation successful? The Atlas team believes it’s about the quality of your partners, the working relationship with them, and the time invested in building solutions.

“I’ve noticed Shiji invests more time and energy into every detail of their implementations,” Abs said. “Every Friday we get together to go through any issues that may have come up, how they were resolved, and how we can get better together.”

Another practice they’ve found helpful for implementations is regrouping after installations on what was learned and any adjustments that need to be made moving forward.

For Atlas, these things have made is a big difference as compared with other platforms they have worked with.

Free to operate with agility

Upgrading its F&B technology has made the Atlas team more efficient, consistent, and innovative. Today, the rollout of menu changes across all of their hotels happens with a click of a button. “It’s taken away so much pain and made life so much easier.”

Abs shared an example of introducing new products to their hotel bars and then customizing the menu where needed. Infrasys allows them to create products and quickly attach them to each hotel based on their location and guest demographics.

“We’re now using logic and data to make better decisions rather than spending time going back-and-forth with different teams.”

Empowered to make data-driven decisions

True data-driven decision-making is now possible for Atlas. “I can easily log into Infrasys and take a look at reports on what products are our top sellers. We can set up daily reports to be sent to ourselves or anyone on our team. We didn’t have that before.”

For Erica and Abs, being able to understand which items are selling well and which items are selling poorly means they can now reallocate product inventory between hotels and adjust menus to increase overall sales and revenue. They were also able to run incentive programs on product sales much easier than before.

“One of our company values is using data to make decisions, and we’ve added a technology and a data team to show we’re serious about this,” Abs noted.

This investment has changed the culture of the company. Now we don’t need to rely on guesswork. We have data that allows us to make better decisions, make our guests happier, and keep us ahead of the competition. Our work with Shiji enables all of that.

We’ve seen our working relationship with Shiji has been more productive and innovative than others.”

Making data easy to collect and analyze enables more transparency, which has been a key focus for Atlas according to Abs. “Making data and reporting available to all - not just the senior executives - is the only way to operate as a truly data-driven company. It allows junior management in various members of our operations team to get the information they need to do their jobs better. They can look at product sales for themselves and use that information to have conversations with us about ways we can improve.”

“Without Infrasys we wouldn’t be able to know what was selling or not selling as quickly – it just took us a lot more time to get the data we needed,” Erica added.

Preventing food waste

There are other specific benefits across the business as a result of using Infrasys, and preventing food waste is an example. “Preventing waste has always been a priority for us at Atlas. We offer breakfast for free, and Infrasys has allowed us to record what products are being wasted.”

This data then is consolidated and reviewed to understand trends across the company. “We are now able to decide which products should be discontinued because they’re not resonating with our guests.”