Loews Hotels serves up food, beverage management software

Computerworld - Loews Hotels Inc. can get detailed information on guest reservations at its 18 properties in the U.S. and Canada in an instant using its IT tools. But when it comes to tracking the food and beverages served in its hotels, the hotel and resort chain still relies on old-fashioned paper reports and printed spreadsheets.

That will change by the end of the year, when the New York-based company finishes rolling out software to better monitor and control the food and beverage operations in its hotel restaurants and bars, said Zack Miller-Murphy, vice president and controller of Loews Hotels.

It’s not uncommon for some facets of the hospitality industry to be less tech-savvy than others, he said. “[Hotels] should be more computerized, but the industry just hasn’t gone [in] that direction," said Miller-Murphy.

Loews has monitored sales, inventory, ordering and food-portion control with spreadsheets and other reports for years, but it is slow and cumbersome. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that in food and beverage control, there are so many transactions you need to track,” Miller-Murphy said. “How much steak you buy, how much arrives, how big a serving, if it sold, was it stored properly” and more, for every single dish and beverage served. “Every hotel in the world has these systems set up to do that,” he said.

Loews found that compiling reports is so labor-intensive that workers weren’t able to analyze ways to save money. Instead, the reports took hours to complete and were often shelved without even being reviewed. “We felt like we were operating in the 19th century from the systems standpoint,” Miller-Murphy said. “We realized that we were woefully behind the times a few years ago.”

About three years ago, several Loews executives met to figure out how to update the company’s food and beverage management system without hiring more people or adding inventory. “It was from a desire to improve what we felt were lackluster controls on food and beverages,” Miller-Murphy said.

Seven vendors were reviewed by a task force, and Eclipse software from Adaco Services LLC was chosen. Loews had installed the Adaco software in its Miami Beach locations on a trial basis five years ago. “We saw food and beverage costs drop one percentage point,” Miller-Murphy said. “If you’re able to move food costs by a point, everybody in the industry would say, ‘How’d you do that?'"

That eventually led to the companywide rollout that began last year and now includes 60% of the chain’s hotels. Instead of having to use three- or four-part forms and manual tabulations to order restaurant and bar supplies, workers using the software have cut response and approval times and reduced the amount of manual record-keeping. The company also plans to use the software to manage inventories of dishware, linens and glassware in the next 12 months,.