'Our main focus for this year is on seamless integration and quality offerings'

The Rs 450 crore Eastern India Hotels runs India's top hotel chain. But the Oberoi Group is also a pioneers of IT in India's hospitality industry. PK Mukhopadhyay, AVP (systems) describes IT at EIH-and the products and services it spun off.

What core apps do you use in Oberoi Hotels?

We realized early that IT will play an important role in the hospitality industry and it become a key component of our business strategy. Each of the Oberoi Group hotels runs the Property Management System (PMS) from Micros Fidelio, which integrates the guest check-in, billing, guest information, room occupancy and revenue applications at the level of individual hotels. The PMS is further integrated to various other stand-alone systems such as the touch-screen based Point of Sales System (PSS) for creating bills in restaurants, health clubs and laundry.

The implementation of Fidelio led to the standardization of software and applications across the hotel chain and this enabled the entire IT set-up to be re-structured by segregating the applications into back-office and front office applications.

The stand-alone front-end PMS from Fidelio was integrated with an Oracle-based Central Reservation System (CRS). The main advantage of such a system was the creation of a centralized database of guest profiles from all hotels. The CRS is connected with the stand-alone PMS to create a centralized pool of data with information covering aspects such as food, room preference, likes and dislikes of the guest. The information, being centrally available, helps the hotel in servicing guests according to their preferences.

The system also helps hotels in delivering more efficient services to its guests in terms of centralized room status system to enable immediate booking for any hotel from anywhere. The back-office system being integrated with the front-office PMS (which in turn is interfaced with CRS) enables the hotels to seamlessly integrate the back-office operations of all the group hotels.

And the infrastructure behind these apps?

The PMS and the back-office systems of the hotels run on their individual LANs, the CRS on the other hand runs on the group's Wide Area Network operating on 12 VSATs from Telestra, installed across all the group hotels. While the hotels in Mumbai and Delhi use fiber optic cabling for their LAN networks, CAT 5 structured cabling is being used at all the other locations. VSAT connectivity is being used for online reservation as well as videoconferencing across all our hotels.

Oberoi's in-house software team also spun off commercial products...What happened to them?

In the early 90s, our in-house team developed two hotel management products, one high-end and one low-end, which apart from being used by the Oberois was also implemented in the Trident Hotels, in Le Meridian and in 35 other locations across the SAARC region. While the high-end software was developed on the Solaris system using the Sybase RDBMS platform, Novell Netware was used for low-end applications because of its lower costs.

Though these applications were scuttled during the re-structuring in 1995, of late our Investor Services division has gone for an own demat server that is connected to two depositories, namely NSDL and CSDL. Apart from in-house work, we also do jobs for Durgapur Projects and Warren Tea among others. The in-house team in Kolkata developed share management applications for FDs, debentures besides consolidation of financial closure in-house and preparation of balance sheets conforming to statutory requirements.

You have Wi-Fi in key places like Mumbai and Delhi. Any plans to expand, or make it affordable?

Currently, we have Wi-Fi implementation across four of our hotels in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. We would expand to other hotels this year, when we might be bringing down the access prices, which are now in the range of Rs 200 per hour.

What's ahead in 2004?

There are two major areas, namely integration and quality, where our IT focus would mainly concentrate in 2004. One is to find a proper back-office ERP that would integrate seamlessly with Fidelio Micros, so that we have the best level of integration and best quality at any point of time. Though Fidelio's integration with CRS is not much of an issue, there are problems regarding its integration with OASES at the back-end. We are looking at replacing our back-end with either Oracle Financial or JD Edwards.

Besides, there are plans on the conceptual stage to have a grid computing solution from IBM or Oracle as we have so many hardware resources across so many locations. Also on the anvil are plans to have a knowledge management solution, some BI tools as well as an e-learning application.