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Eclipse helps to improve Accounting & Financials at Accor
Accor is the world's largest hotel and tourism group with more than 4,000 hotels and resorts in 90 countries as well as restaurants, leisure services, travel agencies, catering services and casinos. Accor's hotel brands include Sofitel, Novotel, All Seasons, Grand Mercure, Mercure, Ibis and Formule 1. In a joint ventrue with Becton Resorts, Accor also has the Accor Premier Vacation Club (APVC), an exciting and flexible holiday and lifestyle club.
In Australia and New Zealand, there are over 100 Accor hotels and resorts, covering all prime business and holiday destinations. Accor properties are spread across metropolitan capital cities, other major cities, as well as regional hubs. APVC has its head office in Robina on the Gold Coast, as well as three regional centres in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.
In 2003, Accor decided to undertake a major accounting upgrade at a number of its hotel sites in Australia and New Zealand. The largest part of the upgrade was implementing SunSystems accounting software and to a lesser extent, Great Plains accounting and PayGlobal.
The goal was to consolidate 45 hotel ledgers into Accor’s corporate ledger, with a high degree of consistency in processing and accounting practice. An additional challenge required the project to abide by French financial reporting rules, (Accor is a French company) as well as conforming to local statutory and management reporting requirements in Australia and New Zealand.
The project was complex because Accor wanted to decentralize its financial processes and staff from individual hotel sites to eight centralised hubs. In most cases, each hub would service between five to six hotels although some hubs serviced up to ten sites.
A Complex Project Completed and Delivered with Success
Chris King, Corporate Information Manager at Accor required Eclipse to own every part of the implementation by taking control of the project from the outset, providing strong leadership and customer service. This required Eclipse to understand and build Accor’s processes into the implementation as well as complying with them themselves, adding another layer of complexity to the project.
Deployment needed to be consistent in order to achieve a standard Chart of Accounts, standard reporting, and standardised accounting entries. Eclipse deployed SunSystems at a single location as a test pilot site. Once that was established and standardization achieved, implementation took place throughout the remaining sites.
Chris King had initially been impressed with Eclipse’s view on customer service and at project completion three years later, he noted that through all phases of the project, Eclipse’s dedication to the project and customer service was outstanding. All key personnel who started on the project, finished the project. This created a large amount of stability throughout implementation and ensured strong relationships were established with key stakeholders at Accor. Eclipse’s experience in dealing with similar projects and installations meant that Accor could rely on the project team’s expertise, and ensure the successful completion of the project.
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