Here’s a challenge to anyone who manages functions, people or processes in the club industry. We know you like all of your members (or at least, you should act as if you do). But what about your database, and more importantly, its extended family—your data? Do you not only like them, too, but actually have such a real attachment that you miss them when they’re not around, and pretty much can’t operate without them?
You should. You should love your data and your database. You should think of them fondly, passionately, as not only what you draw your breath from today, but also what you want to spend the rest of your professional life with. They hold the keys to success in your current roles, and the secrets to advancing to your next ones.
And the best part is, data can be a very cheap date and low-maintenance partner. While integrated systems are the glamorous, Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies of the data world, you can find true happiness with a nerdy, Bill Gates-like spreadsheet, too. Like any relationship, it’s a lot more about compatibility and interaction than it is about the package itself.
Reading Between the (Spreadsheet) Lines
Brian Mullins, Club Manager of Longmeadow Country Club, Longmeadow, Mass., has found ways to get extra mileage out of older systems that are still in place at his club, by making a constant and concerted effort to go beyond their basic, original offerings. At Longmeadow—a 500-member private club with a good-sized waiting list of prospective members—Mullins draws on a combination of data from his POS system, accounting system, and a membership database, to track usage, sales, and customer covers.
“We look at things like which events and menu items are most popular, and what days of the week are busiest,” Mullin says. Based on what the numbers tell him, he can then make adjustments to forecasts and plans, and budget accordingly.
All of this is accomplished without a sophisticated integrated system in place, and the same can be said for the club’s Web site, where Mullin says, “the amount of information is small, but members do have on-line access to statements.”
From both the management and user side, then, while this may not be the sexiest use of technology to be found in a club setting, it represents a good and consistent, practical use of available data.
Luge Runs and Data Runs
At Glenwild Golf Club and Spa in Park City, Utah, General Manager Ramon Gomez relies primarily on good old Excel to help run his part of the operations in a 950-acre golfing community—no small task, as the property encompasses not only over 190 housing sites, but also a Tom Fazio-designed course rated the best in Utah by Golf Digest.
The club, staffed at 140 in-season, also offers fine and casual dining, a spa and treatment facility, fitness center, and year-round swimming pool. Golf is seasonal, but winter activities include cross-country skiing and even a luge run.
Gomez uses Microsoft’s spreadsheet staple to develop the reports his managers run on a regular basis, collecting data that gives everyone keen insights on both current and future activity.
“Every Friday, each manager reports on the week’s revenue, labor costs, expenses, food, cost of goods, etc., and they also forecast the rest of the month,” Gomez says. Explaining the distinction between weekly reporting and monthly forecasting, he adds, “Week one of the month, they report on that week and forecast the next three weeks; week two, they’ll only forecast the last two weeks, and so on.”
The Glenwild management reports use data extracted from the food and beverage, accounting and payroll systems. The reporting from his staff gives the general manager a comfort level because, as he says, “I know where I am every week.” Not only does Gomez have a running view of each department, his fourteen managers maintain intimate familiarity with their own departments’ activity.
“If a manager forecasts he’s $5,000 back,” Gomez says, “and then ends up $10,000 back…or $10,000 up, I don’t care. I want him to be able to explain what’s hitting his numbers to make that happen.”
An Acquired Skill
This kind of deep data digging is not something that comes automatically to the staff. “It takes a new manager between three and six months to learn how to do it,” Gomez says, “but when they do, they are usually within 5% [of budget forecast].”
If Gomez had a system that could integrate data in the way he wanted and automatically produce the reports he currently has his managers work on, would he replace what he’s currently doing through Excel? The emphatic answer is no.
“When crunch time came, I could see managers just letting the system send the report,” he says. “But looking closely at the data makes the managers think, it helps them understand their departments better, and they have to look closely at what affects them,”
Even though there is an intervening data extraction step in how Glenwild pulls its numbers together, the process is not unlike many other special reporting tasks. Having a database is clearly just a starting point. The managers at Glenwild are better operators for their efforts, and are discovering that getting close to their data is a key to success.
Right At Your Fingertips
Certainly, there are advantages to using integrated system technology, which is considered something of a holy grail, for most effectively capturing and analyzing needed operating data. Conventional wisdom says that integrated systems are the way to go, especially in environments like clubs and resorts, which have such a variety of cost and activity centers.
Integrated systems can bring the data from all of these departments together in a uniform way, and can also let everyone share a single database for many different applications. And integrated systems generally provide very good reporting capabilities.
But as illustrated by the Long-meadow and Glenwild examples—and many others like them that now exist and are functioning equally effectively in club settings—not having an integrated system doesn’t mean you have to be left out of the game. Even without a system, if you’re collecting information on computer stations in each department, you’re likely to already have the chief benefit of integration: available data that you can slice and dice in whatever way you need to.
Use of any software application means you already have the data; you just have to learn to use it better. A “database,” after all, can be something as straightforward and simple as a list, a flat file or a spreadsheet. So those without an integrated system shouldn’t feel left out.
The Road Best Traveled
The roles of managers in the club industry, and the primary challenges to them, are no different than in most other industries. They need to learn to work smarter and then be smarter about what they do.
That means knowing as much as possible about what affects the bottom line, while still maintaining and enhancing the member experience. If you’re the food and beverage manager, or running the golf or tennis shop, or managing the spa, how do you learn more about the things that affect what you manage? Remember and repeat this mantra often: Follow the data, search the database.
The best general managers in the club business actually look forward to having their department heads explain why something unexpected has occurred. Such as, for example, why there are forty pounds of catfish in the freezer, when none of the dining rooms currently serve catfish. Or why two people were booked in the same spa massage room at the same time. Or (much more often) why actual numbers made a mocke
ry of budgeted forecasts last month.
In all of these cases, no amount of automation will give you the answers. You have to go get it. Good technology will direct you; it’s there in the data, perhaps a little obscured, but it’s there. And usually, data is the best—only—way to explain something that otherwise looks unexplainable.
Direct Reports
Getting to and at the data are only the first steps, though; once you have it, it also needs to be collected and presented in a fashion that’s efficient and understandable. That’s why the biggest data-related challenge for large or multi-faceted organizations is to have good visibility across many locations. Consoli-dated data and standardized reporting are a requirement in these environments, while across-the-board integration is actually not as important an issue, as long as data is consistently captured and stored.
At the other end of the technology food chain, a single, simple database in a small club can also yield gold when properly mined. In the vast middle—where most clubs are—the need for integration is in large part a need for consistency and data availability.
And even where there is a terrific relational database, with everything possible stored and indexed, you can’t always count on the canned reports that it will produce. Even the best system will only have a fraction of the reports you’ll need. Despite what they may tell you, no systems vendor can fully anticipate all of the reporting needs of a particular organization.
As a critical part of their overall data-mining and management strategies, therefore, club managers and department heads need to be sure to take the initiative and time to decide just what it is they really need to see, and in what form and how often they need to see it. And to really be effective in capturing and using the data that’s at their disposal, that usually means they also need to be prepared to create and run their own reports. Customized report programming done by a vendor can get expensive, and—trust us on this—you’ll still always want to change something about the report.
Some systems have ad hoc report capabilities, plus there are general-purpose report-writers that are commercially available, such as Crystal Reports, that can be used on data extracted from either a single system or multiple systems. And, as we’ve already seen, it’s still very possible to effectively use Microsoft Excel for many of a club’s more basic reporting needs.
Doing is Understanding
Perhaps there is a true “push a button, out comes the answer” club management system out there, or in development. Maybe it is possible that the fully automated system is the answer to every vexing problem of management. But if that’s the case, what does that expectation say about management? As the saying attributed to Confucius (and sometimes also to former Yankees catcher Yogi Berra) goes: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.”
Good technology should let you do things that were difficult (or not even possible) to do before. Good technology should make it easier to do your job…but, you still have to do it, and if you manage in a club environment, the more you know about your job, and about the people and things you manage, the better you’ll be able to manage.
So once again, the key to current and future success as a manager comes back to the data itself. The closer you get to your data, the more you’ll understand your business. Being the smart person that you are, that should make you a better manager. So remember to hug your data today. C&RB
Summing It Up
• Integrated systems can bring data from all departments together in a uniform way, let everyone share a single database for different applications, and provide good reporting capabilities. But even without such a system, valuable data can be mined from individual computers and applications.
• A “database” can also be something as simple as a list, flat file or spreadsheet.
• As a critical part of their overall data-mining and management strategies, club managers and department heads need to decide just what it is they really need to see, in what form, and how often.
• Learn to use and adapt ad hoc reporting capabilities that come with most systems, or commercially available general-purpose report-writers, to help you use the data that you extract from your systems more effectively.
Out With the Bad Data, In With the Good
If the prizes of technology use are data and the database, then their care and feeding should be high-profile tasks. When you depend on your data to make decisions, invoice customers, and pay bills, you are trusting that it is accurate. Any application worth using will have edit and error checking as a routine part of its function.
Even so, bad data can creep in. Interfaces are a notorious source of bad data. We’ve talked to several club financial managers who can attest to the embarrassment of explaining interface-caused billing errors to an annoyed member.
As the club examples in this month’s main feature illustrate, it can be very useful to extract a subset of your database for analysis and subsequent action. In fact, a case can be made that it’s essential for good management to do so, on a regular basis. This not only helps you gain a deeper understanding of the numbers that define your operation, you also have an opportunity to validate what you see.
Once a manager understands and is comfortable using the data extracted from available sources, he/she becomes the best source for knowing whether the basic numbers are correct. Even if your club has the luxury of a dedicated Information Technologies staff, entrusting data integrity completely to IT is a mistake. In best practice, it is a shared task. IT has the role of applying the business rules consistently within the systems it maintains, but the ultimate responsibility for the data lies with those who use it and rely on it.
Remember Putt’s Law, which holds that “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”
Bridging the Gap
A manager’s job—in coordination with IT, if it exists in your club’s structure—is to bridge the gap between these two factions. If, as a manager, you take on this task, what should you look for?
Some of the most common problems encountered when using data are:
• records or fields missing, or the opposite problem, duplicate records.
• Sometimes the wrong codes or unknown codes can be applied to records.
• You need to understand how calculations are made and then check for bad calculations.
• Inconsistency errors are sometimes hard to spot, but the more familiar you are with the numbers, the better you can be at seeing what, and where, they are.
• Then there’s the one that’s somewhat easier to spot, plain old incomprehensibility.
Knowing What to Look For
In The Case for Data Warehousing, Larry Greenfield offers advice that is appropriate to all data-validation tasks. “Be prepared for a lot of tedious work,” he cautions. “Probably the most important ‘tools’ for solving these problems are a sharp eye and endurance for checking an abundance of detail information.
“You may spend much more time checking for errors than cleaning them up,” Greenfield adds. “Most of these errors do not jump out at you. The errors of inconsistency are the most difficult to handle. Sometimes what co
nstitutes ‘correct’ data is debatable.”
Identifying errors is step one; correcting them is the second step. If you don’t have a well-understood and documented process to make corrections and find the sources of errors for the reports and systems that you rely on to manage your club on a daily basis, you should establish one.
The process shouldn’t be informal, but it shouldn’t be onerous either. It should include vetting of the “debatable” corrections Greenfield refers to. When there are conflicting opinions, everyone should be allowed to defend their positions. This can be a healthy process that will lead to overall improvement in how needed data is identified, captured and used to help improve your management processes.
But once it’s been hashed out, there should be one person with the overall responsibility of applying changes; this can be an IT role, if such a department is available.
If the database is the most valuable technology asset, keeping it in shape should be everyone’s job. This must be seen as a win-win process for both the database administrator and the managers who are using it. It’s your data. Your ability to manage effectively depends on its accuracy. So make sure you give it all the care it needs. —TG
RFI Template: Progress Report and Review
Another step in the development of the information systems RFI (request for information) template, first announced at February’s Club Managers Association of America (CMAA) conference (C&RB, April, p. 50), was taken during June’s HITEC hospitality industry technology conference in Los Angeles. A working group of members from CMAA and the Hospitality and Financial Technology Professionals (HFTP), along with club technology vendors and other club professionals, saw an updated version of the document that is a first pass at providing a process for both clubs and software vendors to interact in a pre-sales environment. The template, downloadable from both the CMAA (www.cmaa.org) and HFTP (www.hftp.org) Web sites, is a 48-page, .PDF document and is described as a reference tool and guideline for clubs to use in developing RFIs. The final usable document will be an editable MS Word document.
From someone who’s sent out his fair share of RFIs, here’s a quick review of the club-specific RFI template, in its current state:
• It’s big. Forty-eight pages is substantial, but not as big as some RFIs I’ve seen. Not every club will need to use every page, so an initial once-through should be helpful to boil down what a specific club really needs.
• Even if it’s not used to screen potential system vendors, the RFI provides a great roadmap for clubs to do some self-inspection and review and record how they actually use current technology, develop an up-to-date inventory, benchmark transactions, etc. That can only be a good thing. Using it can also help you better understand what’s important—and what might not be—for technology you want to apply in your club.
Assuming it’s a work in progress, and in the spirit of the time-honored RFC (request for comments) process, here are areas that need work:
• The information requested of vendors is in places general, and in other places very detailed. The “General and Technical Requirements” are pretty general and not well-organized; the “Application Requirements” seem comprehensive and are very detailed. To this point, the F (Financial) in HFTP seems to be more active and influential than the T (Technology).
• The document doesn’t include adequate guidance for describing a club’s technical infrastructure. Granted, the focus is on software, but there are important prerequisites, and this is one. More information needs to be gathered and presented by the club describing both the network topology (10MB, 100MB, 1GB, number of nodes, wired and/or wireless, etc), and the devices that use the network—how old or new is the equipment, operating systems and office software. Just listing equipment lets the vendor fill in the blanks, usually with the wrong assumptions. Even a high-level implementation plan can be seriously wrong as a result.
• One of the RFI’s stated goals is to help select integrated systems. There needs to be a club-specific definition of what that means. Asking a vendor who can’t supply a module to recommend another who can takes a systems shopper down the slippery slope toward interface purgatory.
• Along with a high-level implementation plan, it would be wise to ask for an outline of the scope of work, as understood by the vendor. That would give the buyer a handy snapshot of what’s in and what’s out.
Finally—-and this may fall into the category of picking language nits:
• Requesting the response on diskette can cast the wrong reflection on the state of technological savvy in the industry. CD, DVD, flash drive or secure Web are all better options. If you need it on paper, you can print it.
• The term “data processing” might also place the industry in the wrong decade. Unless you have a surplus IBM 4381 mainframe running COBOL, retire the term. Likewise, no one uses (or should use) hubs anymore; switches are in. And save yourself the steps measuring distance to the server; your next one might be in a hosting center in another state. —TG
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