Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that Accor IMEA, an augmented hospitality leader with more than 400 hotels in India, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, is transforming its accounting systems with Infor SunSystems, a financial management solution, on AWS.
The transformation will position the group to benefit from an anticipated rebound in the region’s hospitality sector as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic abates and the region gears up for mega events including Expo 2020 Dubai.
Accor operates over 5,100 hotels across 110 countries globally. It has deployed Infor SunSystems to develop its new chart of accounts, and to manage and automate the finances for its hotels in the India, Middle East, Africa and Turkey region.
Johny Zakhem, Accor IMEAT chief financial officer, said: “As the Middle East hospitality sector looks to welcome more guests post-pandemic, Accor will be ideally positioned to manage our finances and accounts in an agile and intelligent way. 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.”
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The hotel group was previously using an on-premises solution for its accounts in the Middle East and wanted to migrate to a SaaS model on the public cloud to provide greater resilience, help standardise its systems, and improve overall efficiency, oversight and security.
Given the complexity of managing accounts across multiple jurisdictions, Accor needed a solution capable of providing a unified chart of accounts for its hotels across the region, while also being compliant with the internationally recognised Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI).
The SaaS solution also gives greater flexibility for members of the accounts teams to work remotely during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, providing greater operational resiliency.
By adopting Infor SunSystems, Accor will also streamline its budgeting and forecasting processes, enabling hotel managers to improve their ability to plan ahead. It will drastically reduce downtime caused by hardware problems and software updates.
More than 50 Accor hotels across Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, and Oman are already covered by the SunSystems solution, and more hotels are in the process of migrating to the solution. Accor hopes to see about 200 hotels live on it by the end of the year.
Stan van Roij, vice-president of hospitality solutions for Infor, said: “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. We look forward to continuing the deployment of SunSystems across Accor’s regional footprint, helping the company improve its reporting, increase its agility and oversight, and save valuable resources.”
Since signing the initial agreement, the Accor IMEA regional corporate finance team based in Dubai has also migrated to the Infor Cloud, demonstrating the clear benefits for individual hotels and at a regional level.
