Accor, which has more than 400 hotels in India, the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, is updating its accounting systems in the region with Infor SunSystems, a financial management solution on Amazon Web Servers. Accor has deployed Infor SunSystems to develop its new chart of accounts, and to manage and automate the finances for its hotels in the region.
“As the Middle East hospitality sector looks to welcome more guests post-pandemic, Accor will be ideally positioned to manage our finances and accounts in an agile and intelligent way,” said Johny Zakhem, CFO, Accor IMEAT. “Infor SunSystems will enable us to automate and standardize our financial management, making reporting easier and more accurate across our operations in the Middle East, while also boosting efficiency and helping individual hotels.”
The hotel group previously was using an on-premises solution for its accounts in the Middle East and wanted to migrate to a software-as-a-service model on the public cloud to provide greater resilience, help standardize its systems and improve overall efficiency, oversight and security. By adopting Infor SunSystems, Accor will also streamline its budgeting and forecasting processes, helping hotel managers to plan ahead. It will reduce downtime caused by hardware problems and software updates, and will also facilitate remote operations as employees continue to work from home.
Given the complexity of managing accounts across multiple jurisdictions, Accor needed a solution capable of providing a unified chart of accounts for its hotels across the region while also being compliant with the internationally recognized Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry.
More than 50 Accor hotels across Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar and Oman are already covered by the SunSystems solution, and more hotels are in the process of migrating to the solution. Accor hopes to see about 200 hotels live on it by the end of the year.
“Accor IMEA is clearly demonstrating the value of SaaS, with the group moving from a [capital expenditure]-intensive model that required hardware to a far more efficient and flexible [operating expense] model,” said Stan van Roij, VP hospitality solutions, Infor. “We look forward to continuing the deployment of SunSystems across Accor’s regional footprint, helping the company improve its reporting, increase its agility and oversight, and save valuable resources.”
Accor operates more than 5,100 hotels across 110 countries. Since signing the initial agreement, the Accor IMEA regional corporate finance team based in Dubai also has migrated to the Infor Cloud.
