M3 Eases Back-Office Processes For Summit Hospitality
Through the power of M3's Product Suite, Accounting Core, Insight, & Labor Management.
Summit Hospitality (Summit) is a hotel management company managing 19 properties throughout North Carolina. In total, Summit manages close to 2,300 guest rooms and nearly 800 employees for its portfolio of hotels.
Summit has been a customer of M3 since 2018 and currently utilizes the full M3 product suite: Accounting Core, Insight, and Labor Management. Summit finds that having all back-office software applications under one platform streamlines its processes and makes the company more efficient. With that, Summit utilizes M3’s Labor Management and Modeling tool to its fullest capability and has seen money and time savings from doing so.
The Challenge
Summit was looking for better ways to get real-time and accurate insight into its business expenses, labor costs being number one, so that it could make crucial business decisions on demand. Summit was also frustrated with the lack of hospitality knowledge and integration its old platform provided.
In addition, Summit was unable to monitor labor standards and minimally monitor labor. It could not easily customize its labor management dashboards, which caused more time and effort to use the tool than needed or wanted – also resulting in time and money wasted.
The Solution
When on the look for new labor management platforms for Summit, Glenn Young, Risk & Financial Officer stated, “The integrations M3 offered were a huge value add we saw that would help us with data integrity, and the fact that M3 was hospitality specific gave us peace of mind that we would be in good hands.”
M3’s Labor Management would enable Summit to identify overtime hours before they happen, eliminate unnecessary hours, and ensure that every penny is money well spent. In addition, the platform would drive Summit’s bottom line through customized reporting that would allow them to reign in labor expenses and act on real-time data and the ability to have automated processes to save hours at each property.
The ability to monitor labor standards and dynamic scheduling added functionality Summit was previously missing. The company wanted to be able to have access to actionable labor standards for the hospitality industry so they could be tracked against and easily create and maintain schedules for hotel employees.
Summit also saw the value in coupling Labor Management with M3’s robust and state-of-the-art business intelligence platform, Insight. The two platforms combined would assist the company in having personalized dashboards that provide real-time insight into daily labor costs and customization to see the data that is most important in managing its portfolio of hotels.
The Results
Over the past four years, M3 has aided Summit Hospitality to be more efficient in managing labor; although, Summit has yet to utilize Labor Management to its fullest capability across its entire portfolio. Summit is now seeing the benefits of using the M3 product suite and plans to implement M3 at all properties as its portfolio grows. Having real-time and accurate labor data has been extremely beneficial and has reduced Summit’s overtime costs – adding time and money back into the company’s pocket.
“We have been able to hand our hotel General Managers a tool to see their labor costs versus their budget on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, and monthly basis,” said Young.
The ability to monitor labor standards versus actuals within Labor Management has also been a pivotal part of the success of Summit. The company is able to create a strong business strategy driven by principles that will help them do more with less. Having lean operations will help improve day-to-day processes by staying efficient while also increasing productivity.
However, the biggest benefit of all for Summit is the ability to use Accounting Core, Labor Management, and Insight in conjunction with each other. M3 has solved Summit Hospitality’s issues by having multiple platforms and data points condensed to one hospitality technology provider. One Company. One Brand. One Platform.
“Being able to integrate multiple data sources into one place is very helpful,” says Young. He continues, “Having accounting, labor, GSS, STR, and PMS feeds all in one place is not an easy thing to do, and M3 does it well.”
Moving forward, Summit plans to start utilizing the M3 Labor Management mobile application, M3 Labor, to its fullest potential. Through the M3 Labor App, Summit will be able to see labor variances, true up punches for labor accuracy, and manage time off requests all from the palm of their hands. Soon, Summit will be able to use geofencing to ensure employees are clocking in where they should be, and in turn, decrease human error in the time punch process.
The benefits Summit Hospitality are experiencing cannot be duplicated without having a hotel technology provider that has tailored its products to fit the needs of hoteliers. M3 platforms were all built by hoteliers, for hoteliers, providing integrations, partnerships, and features that cannot be matched.