The 'Pink Palace' Picks Agilysys for Materials Management

Published: September 12, 2006

by Alex Woodie

The Beverly Hills Hotel, a five-star Southern California resort known locally as "The Pink Palace," plans to stay in the black with a little help from a new OS/400-based inventory and procurement solution purchased from Agilysys, the iSeries distributor announced last week.

When people stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows, which employs 450 workers to service 204 rooms during peak season, they expect a certain level of luxury. As such, it's not really an option for the hotel to run out of clean linens or key ingredients for its three restaurants and bars. The unthinkable won't happen with the Materials Management System (MMS), a well established application that's been used at some of the world's top hotels and casinos.

The Beverly Hills Hotel plans to streamline its operations and improve cost controls by implementing four MMS modules, including the Inventory, Purchasing, Menu/Recipe Analysis, and Bar Coding. MMS is often implemented alongside another industry-standard application Agilysys acquired from Inter-American Data (IAD) in 2003, the Lodging Management System (LMS), but it is unclear if the hotel is also using this product.

Dan Flores, director of IT for the Beverly Hills Hotel, says the new software will help the hotel fulfill its commitment to customer service. "MMS helps us eliminate paperwork, enables us to have a current accounting of items in stock and automatically orders and replenishes items based on our par levels," he says. "What took us one week has been reduced to a couple days."

The software has the capability to track costs to a single plate, and maximize revenues on specific recipes and menu items, according to Todd Labhart, the hotel's controller "The MMS Bar Code Module will provide us with wireless data collection of our physical inventory. With a swipe of a scanner, data goes directly into our system, reducing errors, and labor costs."