Apex Hotels Boosts Efficiency with Infor Sales & Event Management
UK-wide hotel group sees significant reduction in time taken to deal with enquiries with cloud solution from Infor
Apex Hotels is a family-owned, 4-star group that was founded in 1996 with nine city centre and rural hotels in some of the UK’s most popular locations, including London, Bath, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Pitlochry. Founded in 1996, it has grown to be one of the UK’s leading independent luxury hotel chains, attracting leisure and corporate guests from across the globe.
Apex Hotels prides itself on offering consistently high standards for its guests and these high standards extend right across the business, encompassing the group’s business management systems. Back in 2019, Apex took the decision to change its Property Management System (PMS). For the events team this meant that they too needed to look at alternatives to their incumbent events management solution with a view to achieving closer integration with the PMS.
What started as a review necessitated by change elsewhere in the business soon became a good exercise for us to assess how we were using our event management system and look at where we could improve. We looked at several options, assessing the different functionalities and capabilities on offer and one of these options was Infor Sales & Event Management. Infor HMS was chosen as the new PMS software and so it made sense for the events & groups support manager to consider Infor’s events management solution too. Kim Wilkinson, group director of sales at Apex Hotels
Infor Sales & Event Management is a fully integrated, event-management software solution in the cloud, which streamlines booking, operations, catering, finance, and services, from initial inquiry to final invoice.
Kim continues: Having a potentially stronger relationship between our PMS and our event management solution obviously was a key factor in our ultimate choice of Infor Sales & Event Management. One of the biggest drivers in our decision was the willingness of the team at Infor to take on-board our feedback to continually evolve and adapt the system in-line with our business needs. No one else could offer that.
A phased roll-out
The team decided to undertake a phased roll-out, beginning with the Apex City of London Hotel
The team were fully trained-up and we went live successfully at our City of London hotel with a view to continuing the roll-out across another seven of our hotels. However, COVID hit and obviously this had a major impact on our plans. It meant that any further training had to be carried out remotely before the solution could be rolled-out to the other properties. This was by far our biggest challenge in the implementation and, although not the same as having in-person training, ultimately it worked well, partly thanks to just how intuitive the system is to use. We created solution champions at each property and it was these champions who became solution experts, working alongside the team at Infor so we could hit the ground running when things started to return to normal. Callum Douglas, events & groups support manager at Apex Hotels
Greater visibility, accuracy and consistency
In terms of how things have changed with Infor Sales & Event Management, the business has reaped the benefits in a number of areas. The visibility over enquiries has improved greatly, bringing greater clarity to help quickly identify priority bookings. The system provides oversight of just what enquiries the business is dealing with at any moment in time. This gives the team the ability to triage enquiries, prioritising those that need prioritising and ensuring the right people are looped in from the outset.
The way the business logs enquiries has changed too, becoming much more efficient and accurate. As Callum explains: The flexibility of the system has meant that we’ve been able to customise the initial enquiry details form, prescribing which fields need to be filled in and in what order. This makes for a much more conversational and intuitive approach and means it’s much easier for our team to input data while talking to customers.
Additionally, communication with customers is now more consistently accurate. Customers can be emailed from within the system, so there’s no need for team members to come out of the system and log in to their email accounts, cutting and pasting details from one application to another. Increased automation also helps, with enquiries made through Apex Hotels website now automatically linked into the system, which makes for much quicker response times for website enquiries.
Callum continues: Documents such as proposals are generated from within the system too, with the solution automatically populating templates with information direct from Infor Sales & Event Management. Not only does this save us a considerable amount of time but it ensures consistency of communications and accuracy of information going out to customers. Dealing with enquiries used to take between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on the complexity of the enquiry, but I can confidently say this has been significantly reduced since using Infor Sales and Event Management.
An ever-evolving solution
Another area where the business has noticed significant improvements is with reporting capabilities. The team now has the ability to report on aspects they simply couldn’t before. So, things such as response times and enquiry turnaround times. Due to the flexible nature of the system, the team can change the parameters of their reporting framework to suit the specific needs of the business. This makes for more accessible, more accurate and more insightful reporting that can be shared easily with the rest of the organisation.
Kim continues: The ability to adapt the system in line with our specific needs really has made a huge difference to us. For example, we’ve been able to assign ‘tasks’ to our proactive sales team that aren’t related to specific events. This has added another level of transparency to what’s in the pipeline as well as additional accountability to the team too in terms of what they’re doing with prospects and leads. We’ve been able to assign revenue amounts to these tasks for additional context.
As for what the future holds, the team knows that there is potential to do more with the solution.
As Kim concludes: Infor gives us the opportunity to explore all possibilities with the system. The team constantly listens to our feedback, suggestions and challenges, taking on board our practical experience of working in the busy hospitality industry day-in, day-out. This, for us, is where the additional value lies. We have every confidence that we’ll continue to work alongside the team at Infor, challenging the status quo to explore just how far we can go with Infor Sales and Event Management, unlocking further efficiencies and helping us to achieve the best productivity we can.
About Apex Hotels
Apex Hotels is a family-owned 4-star hotel group with chic city centre and rural properties. Eight city centre hotels are in some of the UK’s most popular destinations, London, Bath, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee and one rural hotel is perfectly placed in Pitlochry.
Apex Hotels was founded by Scottish entrepreneur Norman Springford who opened his first hotel in 1996, Apex Grassmarket Hotel in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Since then, the group has grown into one of the UK’s leading independent luxury hotel chains, attracting tourists and corporate guests from across the globe.
Apex Hotels newest country property in Pitlochry, acquired in July 2023, was part of a portfolio expansion strategy paving the way for future brand growth and diversification.
As well as offering consistently high standards for business and leisure guests, Apex Hotels has a committed approach to environmental and sustainable tourism practices and is one of the few independent hotel groups to hold Silver Green Tourism Awards in all city centre hotels.
About Infor
Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. We develop complete solutions for our focus industries. Infor's mission-critical enterprise applications and services are designed to deliver sustainable operational advantages with security and faster time to value. Over 60,000 organizations in more than 175 countries rely on Infor's 17,000 employees to help achieve their business goals. As a Koch company, our financial strength, ownership structure, and long-term view empower us to foster enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers. Visit www.infor.com.
