Global application maintenance costs are cut dramatically as a result of a re-engineering project performed by Aplana Software for Management Technologies

The solution was designed to automate day-to-day operations of hotel service units and is an essential add-on to PMS (Property Management System), the core application for hospitality businesses. The system helps to manage guests service requests and work orders associated with the engineering departments, providing the functionality for management of regular preventive maintenance and un-scheduled orders.

In March 2003, Management Technologies engaged Aplana Software, its Russian partner, for the de-sign and development of a new technology platform for its Espresso! product family, which is used to manage service requests in 450 hotels in 34 countries in the world. The purpose of re-engineering was to deploy the new product in ASP (Application Service Providing) mode. It was expected that new business model would make the system deployment and maintenance process more simple and less expensive, both for the hotels and the solution provider. Prior to that, the solution was shipped in a traditional way involving resource consuming integration with other automation systems and on-going maintenance. Geographical reach of customers slow down further business growth of Management Technologies: the support team counted over 20 members who were virtually “living” on airplanes and cost the company a significant share of revenue.

Aplana’s specialists suggested a web-services technology as a core point of the concept and designed the system as a set of distributed components interacting via the Internet. The system provides mes-sage exchange with line-level employees via all available communication channels (pagers, cell phones, video displays, e-mail, etc.) and is integrated with a voice processing system based on Intel Dialogic. As a result, the following deployment and maintenance features were implemented:

• Quick and smooth integration with other IS using a standardized web-service interface, inter-faces to most popular PMS solutions, such as MICROS-FIDELIO, LMS, SMS are included in the standard product release
• A fully automated workstation upgrade: when a new version becomes available, the system upgrades all thick clients automatically
•  Interactive user support over the Internet
• Secured Internet connection and high system performance even using a dial-up lines

In the last ten days of March, a first commercial system version was released, and started deployment to 450 hotels over the world. Among the pioneers are the leading international hotel networks such as Marriott Hotels Corporation, Interstate Hotels Corporation, Inter*Continental Hotels, Sheraton Hotels and many others

As a result of implementing the new technology, the Management Technologies technical support staff has been decreased to just a few engineers. Anatoly Gayday, Technical Director at Aplana Software says: “The technology concept proposed by Aplana project virtually eliminates the problems and expenses related to on-site deployment and maintenance of the geographically distributed systems. We believe that global scale and incredibly rapid speed of system deployment differentiate this project from many others.”

Anatoliy Babayev, Director of Software Development Management Technologies: “Our cooperation with Aplana is a good example of well-timed business idea being implemented competently using innovative technologies. As a result, we gained a strong competitive advantage that allows us to be “a year ahead” of the other suppliers, while investments into solution design and deployment will pay off within just half a year.”