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How does RPA help the hospitality industry?

RPA robotic process automation is now used in many fields. Most often, companies automate the flow of documents, the preparation of reports. It carries out the collection and processing of information, the migration of data between systems. For example, automatic data transfer reduces manual work. You don't need to work in two interfaces and transfer data from one system to another.

ContentsProcesses RPA can manage:Room reservationsRoom service requests and billingManaging online reservationsThe experience of people working with RPAPros and consConclusion

From experience, hotels mostly automate processing. They sign, transfer and store electronic documents. For this, external integration systems are used. Consider typical situations. Here, using the capabilities of the integration system allows you to automate up to 80% of typical business processes. They are linked to the electronic document flow.

Processes that RPA can handle:

Room reservations

Robotic document signing speeds up order processing and reduces back office load. If there are many reservations, he must check and sign many documents. Without automation, employees manually offload documents from the accounting system. He must upload them to the platform of the electronic document management operator. They must also verify and sign each document separately. It takes a long time and does not exclude errors.

The process can be robotized. The integration system, according to a predetermined scenario, will take the document and check the correctness of its structure and the data it contains. Then he will sign it and send it to the necessary counterparty. It is easy for an employee to monitor whether a document is signed or rejected. As a result, orders are processed automatically.

Room-service-requests and invoicing

Reconciliation of mutual settlements helps identify debt and agree with counterparties on its repayment. Accounting departments without automation must perform reconciliations manually. Even if the company has implemented it, the process is long. You need to find acceptance information for each incoming document and compare the document with the completed acceptance. In addition, manual verification does not eliminate errors.

If a company is engaged in the verification of paper documents, it will be possible to automate the process. Only after they are converted into electronic form for robotic automation. If a company already uses it, it makes sense to use integration systems and buses. The automated reconciliation process may look like this. Inbound delivery data is sent to the integration system. Using robotization, it verifies receipt information, delivery terms and updates the status of documents. Reconciliations are configured according to different scenarios. You can compare goods data, quantity, price, empty fields that need to be filled in FTS format, etc.

Online-reservation management

Reservation systems with rpa in the hotel industry do not support strict FTS standards for electronic documents. To transfer tens of thousands of documents from one format to another, you must either manually transfer data between interfaces. Or you change the accounting system. And this represents a big economic and temporal cost. Robotic document transformation simplifies the task.

The experience of people working with RPA

A regular need of manufacturers and distributors is to reduce the traffic of electronic documents exchanged between counterparties. Based on these data, reports are formed on the amount and intensity of sales, balances of goods of buyers. Regular data slices help you track debt from counterparties or vendors. They ship defective products and make decisions quickly.

The benefit of introducing robotization is sometimes not obvious for companies that are just starting to implement electronic document management. Or they can partially automate processes. Here are some examples of the robotization effect. In what companies started small. Only part of the processes were automated. Even this approach has reduced errors, personnel costs and improved work efficiency.

Advantages and disadvantages

Typically, senior executives fear that IT infrastructure upgrades will be prohibitively expensive with robotic process automation in travel. They also understand that legacy systems typically store historical business data and are deeply integrated with business processes. In this respect, the potential risks of modernization seem to them unnecessarily high. That said, business leaders often forget that legacy infrastructure is not only expensive to operate, but also prone to disruption. In addition, these systems generally do not meet the needs of employees in terms of speed and flexibility of work.

The complexity of systems resulting from the use of RPA is increasing. And almost uncontrollable. After all, when users are involved, their initiatives are extremely difficult to control. The inclusion of robots in the processes leads to a complication of the whole system. The technology must consider the use of graphical user interfaces. It is in a way that was not intended to be used. And this increases the qualification requirements of the employees. As well as the requirements for the qualifications of IT employees.

Conclusion

The particularity of RPA technologies is the ease of doing business, the focus on the needs of individual and local businesses. RPA is easier to focus on the business than other information technologies. They do not require such a long and complex coordination with the company. The same applies when automating complex processes, workflows or complex business logics. RPA is even called a bottom-up approach. This means that automation does not start with global processes, but with operational tasks.