Hotel management company

Challenges

Privately held hotel management, investment, and development company sought to better understand where it could improve its financial operations and technology environments to better position itself in the competitive marketplace. The client was seeking to enhance its competitive advantage by identifying areas of improvement associated with its property management, accounting, shared services, owner /investor relations, and financial / managerial reporting environments. Our team was engaged to complete an objective assessment of the client’s environment including the development and prioritization of detailed recommendations and a action path forward. In addition, the client also sought guidance on an optimum organization structure including the potential for outsourcing its Finance / Accounting /Back-Office operations.

Solutions

Achieving the client’s time sensitive objectives required the following actions:

• Interviewing the Executive team spanning finance, accounting, operations, technology, property management, and holding company resources / key stakeholders.
• Interviewing functional leaders / key stakeholders to gain a detailed understanding of the client’s day-to-day and period end processes.
• Developing current state process maps depicting all material processes and the interrelated use of existing technology to complete the transactions.
• Developing high-level IT topology diagrams depicting application relationships and points of integration.
• Identifying recommendations to drive operational, technological, and processing efficiencies while maintaining or enhancing operational controls and financial / managerial reporting.
• Completing process benchmarking using the APQC toolset to compare / contrast the client’s ranking amongst its peers across 1,000 plus performance measures.
• Identifying target operating model (organization and structure) alternatives that included reorganizing internal resources as well as the potential for outsourcing finance, application and property management to generate the best fit model.
• Prioritizing opportunities / recommendations for improvement.
• Developing detailed timelines / roadmaps for implementing finance, technology, and process recommendations.
• Presenting findings to the Executive team and key stakeholders.

Results

Mazars Consulting team led a successful Finance Process Assessment and Review that met the client’s aggressive timeline. We delivered a full set of “As Is” and “To Be” business processes, application environment models that captured our client’s detailed back-office processes and points of integration, as well as target operating model alternatives.

The client was provided a detailed analysis of where it stood against its peers and a roadmap for making improvements to better position itself in the marketplace. Based on our collaborative work style and ability to understand the client’s business, our team completed this initiative on-time and within budget. Our client categorized the final deliverable as exceptional and had us present our findings to select board members.

Work with us

The information provided here is for general guidance only, and does not constitute the provision of tax advice, accounting services, investment advice, legal advice, or professional consulting of any kind. The information provided herein should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional tax, accounting, legal or other competent advisers.