Major Hotel Streamlines Purchasing and Inventory Management
Newport Beach, Calif., May 6, 2008 – BirchStreet Systems, a leading provider of e-procurement and back office automation solutions, today announced that The Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs has implemented BirchStreet’s Single Property Solution to streamline its purchasing processes. One of Colorado’s premiere hotels, The Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs chose to adopt BirchStreet’s Single Property Solution (SPS) to help automate and manage critical hotel operations. Ê SPS is a comprehensive back-office business system built specifically to meet the challenges of single-site properties. This system was designed to automate and streamline the “Procure-to-Pay” cycle cutting inefficiencies out of the process while strengthening financial controls.
The Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs adopted BirchStreet’s SPS on the advice of Sue Jordan, the hotel’s director offFinance. Ms. Jordan had prior first-hand experience with the BirchStreet Application Suite. Ms. Jordan understood the power of the product and knew The Crowne Plaza would achieve a new level of control over their purchasing by automating the process. Ê “I have used BirchStreet every day and have grown accustomed to having this level of visibility into our purchasing process,” explained Ms. Jordan. “I know how easy it is to use and how much of a difference it can make. My managers have also embraced the system 100% once they realized that controlling their expenses through the declining checkbook made them more efficient, ” says Ms. Jordan. “I was not at all concerned about the implementation because the system is hosted and therefore, had no impact to our IT infrastructure.”
The Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs selected BirchStreet’s SPS for the variety of benefits it provides, from ease of use to competitive cost of ownership. “The ability to have all purchasing reside in one easy-to-use online system will improve our productivity and allow us to maintain a higher degree of control over our purchasing activities,” added Ms. Jordan. “BirchStreet’s solution outshines the competition in features and functionality.”
According to Doug Sanborn, president and CEO of BirchStreet Systems, “BirchStreet’s SPS provides everything a single-site hotel property needs to automate the procurement process. It supports all of the purchasing needs in an affordable and flexible package. We’re pleased to be working with The Crown Plaza Colorado Springs and even more excited that the business came to us from a satisfied user – that alone underscores the value of our product and validates our efforts to offer the industry’s best solution for automated procurement.”
BirchStreet Systems offers solutions that can be run on a single-site or as an enterprise-wide solution to help organizations identify ways to leverage their collective buying power, as well as enforce IT and brand standards. Their solutions provide a comprehensive tool to drive consistent business processes by measuring, predicting and controlling spend. BirchStreet delivers its solutions over the Internet, using the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) model, which reduces the total cost of ownership compared with the traditional method of buying and maintaining enterprise software.
About the Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs
The Crowne Plaza Colorado Springs has 500 guest rooms and over 47,000 square feet of meeting/convention space. The Crowne is Colorado Springs’ largest branded hotel. The hotel is currently undergoing a $12 million renovation, and with the grand opening of Thibodeaux’s in late April, the Crowne Plaza is proud to bring a fresh twist to a traditional Louisiana style kitchen. The Crowne Plaza is owned by a Stamford Property Investments partnership based in London, England and managed by Harrell Hospitality Group based in Dallas, TX.
About BirchStreet
BirchStreet delivers its on demand eProcurement and back office solutions to some of the world’s most recognizable hospitality companies including; Hilton Hotels Corporation, Marriott International, Hyatt Hotels, Interstate Hotels and Resorts and Carlson Hospitality. Multi-lingual and multi-currency capable, over 1,000 locations use BirchStreet’s full-featured, full-service procure-to-pay solutions in North America, Central America, Europe and Asia. BirchStreet’s solutions represent the “best of the web” capabilities to mid-tier and global companies. They help customers reduce the risk, complexity and cost associated with large-scale regional or worldwide procurement and back-office operations, while empowering business users and delivering unprecedented ROI. The application suite includes eProcurement and RFQ; budget tracking and workflow; recipe management, liquor monitoring and menu engineering; inventory and receiving; AP automation; and FF&E/capital projects management. Headquartered in Newport Beach California, the company is managed by a team of enterprise software veterans. For more information, visit www.BirchStreetSystems.com.