Ready to Rebound: Accor Poised for Recovery with Infor SunSystems SaaS

As the region’s hospitality and tourism sector is poised to rebound post-COVID, Accor IMEA is bringing their accounting systems to the cloud by adopting SunSystems, a SaaS-delivered financial management solution from Infor.

This transformation will be carried at both the group’s regional headquarter in Dubai, UAE and more than 400 hotels in India, Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.

For Accor, the transition from the on-premises deployment model to the SaaS one running on AWS is considered necessary to strengthen the group’s operational resilience, standardise its IT infrastructure, and improve overall efficiency, oversight, and cybersecurity.

The SaaS solution allows the finance function’s staff to work remotely during the ongoing pandemic, greatly reducing operational disruptions.

The hotel group also strives for more streamlined planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. Additionally, downtime associated with hardware issues and software updates is considerably reduced.

More than 50 Accor hotels in the region are already using SunSystems, with 150 more are expected to migrate to the solution by the end of this year. But why is SunSystems the chosen accounting system for Accor?

Read more: 7 Things You May Not Have Known about Infor SunSystems

Why Infor SunSystems

Johny Zakhem, CFO of Accor IMEA, explains why Infor SunSystems is the chosen accounting software for the entire hotel group: “Infor SunSystems will enable us to automate and standardise our financial management, making reporting easier and more accurate across our operations in the Middle East, while also boosting efficiency and helping individual hotels.”

In addition to Accor hotels, more than 2,200 other hospitality businesses have trusted Infor SunSystems as their financial management solution, and for good reason.

With its flexible chart of accounts, SunSystems is suitable for a wide range of operating or ownership structures in the hospitality industry.

The solution indulges hotel users with pre-built, USALI-compliant report templates covering every need – daily revenues, KPIs, flash reports, management reports, and statutory reports.

Its multi-currency and multi-language capabilities, being able to support more than 30 languages and up to 5 reporting currencies per transaction, allow hotel chains to operate at east at any country.

What’s more, SunSystems delivers role-based, in-context information directly to desktops or mobile device of specific stakeholders, such as hotel owners, franchise operators, managers, and employees, allowing them to manage work while on the go.

Read more: How Infor SunSystems Hospitality Empowers Hotel Businesses

Now all of these benefits can be delivered to hotel users via the SaaS model on AWS. Compared to the traditional on-premises model, this represents a paradigm shift in how enterprise applications are used.

Why Infor SunSystems SaaS on AWS

The most noticeable difference between SaaS and on-premises software is on the economic side. As Stan van Roij, vice-president of hospitality solutions for Infor, puts it: “Accor IMEA is clearly demonstrating the value of SaaS, with the group moving from a capex-intensive model that required hardware to a far more efficient and flexible opex model.”

Infographic: The Economics of Cloud ERP at a Glance

All Infor SaaS solutions, SunSystems included, are built and delivered on the world’s no.1 cloud infrastructure provider – AWS. For the clients, the benefits are multifold:

High availability

The solution delivery can be spread across multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) to optimise fault tolerance and reduce any risk of downtime.

Rapid scalability

Because of the way Elastic Load Balancing automatically adjusts to cover shifting capacity requirements, SunSystems SaaS can easily adjust to changes in processing volume as demands fluctuate. That’s especially important in the hotel industry that needs to respond to highly variable levels of demand, such as seasonal sales or annual events.

Great elasticity

Thanks to the exceptional flexibility of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), hotel businesses can gain unmatched reliability and availability at no additional cost.

Quick disaster recovery

SunSystems SaaS can be distributed globally across AWS data centres, plus, AWS offers sophisticated global failover capabilities. Combine the two, and you get rapid redeployment of both applications and data in response to nearly any imaginable service disruption around the globe.

In addition to an agile yet robust foundation provided by AWS, SunSystems SaaS’ clients also benefit from a next-gen digital platform – Infor Operating Service (Infor OS).

Infor OS is a cloud operating platform designed to bring productivity, automation, and artificial intelligence together. Infor OS offers a suite of cloud-based enterprise services such as:

Buzzwords like “data-driven decision making” may be overused these days, but one cannot deny the power of analytics in modern enterprises. The last layer of the SunSystems SaaS’ tech stack is Infor Birst, a networked (aka cloud-based) analytics tool that eliminates data silos, generate and share insights to everyone in the business in real-time.

While the industry is still gripped by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading hotel groups like Accor are already positioning themselves for the much-anticipated rebound. Bringing mission-critical systems to the cloud is an indispensable part of such transformation.

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