Newport Beach, CA – September 27, 2017 – BirchStreet is pleased to announce that Island Hospitality Management selected the BirchStreet eProcurement platform for its entire hotel portfolio. West Palm Beach, Fla. based Island Hospitality Management operates a portfolio of 162 premium, select-service, upscale and extended-stay hotels under six different brands, located in 29 states and the District of Columbia.
In selecting its eProcurement platform Island Hospitality had two primary criteria: to make it easy for its properties to order their food and beverage (F&B) items and for its hotel management and properties to be able to tightly monitor supply costs and procurement budgets. In BirchStreet, Island found a user-friendly system, that, with its drilldown checkbook feature, provides property-level and enterprise-wide F&B spend visibility & control. Previously, Island used a proprietary ordering system which didn’t include a food and beverage solution. Switching to the cloud based BirchStreet system will enable Island and its portfolio of properties to significantly improve their F&B ordering and monitoring of business processes.
The industry leading BirchStreet platform will provide Island properties with real-time connectivity to their suppliers. Users can establish order guides that automatically create purchase orders (POs) with an advanced workflow approval process that significantly speeds up the ordering of critical F&B supplies. The BirchStreet checkbook drilldown functionality allows users to monitor budget availability by department or GL code, forecasted purchases, POs pending approval, approved POs, item-level consumption, theoretical balances and item availability. “The feature-rich BirchStreet solution will enable Island Hospitality to better manage our supply chain and reduce costs,” said Rob Auerbach, VP of Procurement at Island.
Combining BirchStreet’s eProcurement technology with its strategic partner and Island’s procurement services provider, Avendra, will drive further cost savings and efficiency. The tight integration of BirchStreet and Avendra, will greatly enhance Island’s visibility into their contracted F&B spend and improve compliance levels. In BirchStreet, users have the ability to expose only certain suppliers as well as flag contracted items so that users know they are buying the right items from the right suppliers.
Island is also able to take advantage of another strategic BirchStreet partnership and its existing system integrations. Even though the Fintech system handles the ordering, invoicing and payments for the tightly controlled alcohol supply chain, the integration between BirchStreet and Fintech will allow Island to capture all its alcohol beverage purchasing data in the system. This allows Island to track, monitor and analyze all of Island’s spend, including alcoholic beverages and maintain the accuracy of its overall budgets and checkbook.
“BirchStreet is definitely the right procure-to-pay partner for us,” stated Auerbach. “They already work with all the major hospitality brands, such as Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott as well as Avendra, our procurement services provider. Previously, we had an older system with limited functionality which required us to use a lot of manual processes. With BirchStreet, we’ll have the best functionality on the market that will help us meet our goals of achieving greater visibility & control over our F&B spend. Most importantly, we’ll have an easy way to order F&B while maintaining a real-time checkbook with budgeting and forecasting, which will increase our compliance levels, too. BirchStreet is a natural fit for us.”
Automating procurement and supply chain processes increases operational efficiencies, driving costs down. Utilizing BirchStreet, Island users will enjoy simplified processes yielding significant time-savings. Within BirchStreet, supplier catalogs and item pricing is just a few clicks away. Since property procurement budgets are in the system, users can easily stay within their guidelines. Instead of having POs piling up on a manager’s desk, the system streamlines the Island purchasing work stream so they are emailed for approval as they get created. Upon approval, POs are sent directly to the supplier via the system. “This will be a huge time savings for our buyers and managers when you compare it to our current manual processes,” enthused Auerbach.
By leveraging the platform across its entire managed portfolio, Island is able to deliver another value-add to its property owners. “We value all of our owner customers and strive to provide them state-of-the-art services and technology. The BirchStreet platform will further our goals to continuously improved business processes and increase our business intelligence,” said Auerbach. “We have high performance standards and we believe BirchStreet’s eProcurement will maximize efficiency and reduce our costs. We expect the ROI on this investment to be very high.”
BirchStreet is thrilled to welcome Island Hospitality Management into our family of prestigious customers.
