www.upperquadrant.com sales@upperquadrant.com Phone: 703.476.1992

Customer Success Story

Industry

Hospitality

UQube Users

100+ Users

This US-Based hospitality Fortune 500 company needed help to better collect, organize, standardize, and analyze all of their marketing spend information associated with their nearly 3,900 hotels distributed across 11 brands located in over 90 countries. They wanted one, easy-to-use application that could be deployed and accessed simultaneously by all the stakeholders to give them real-time information and insight.

The company turned to Upper Quadrant to deploy UQube to centralize their information, aggregating their manual entry data (Excel spreadsheets) into UQube Grids and automating their collection of big data from silos through Datasets for quick review in Dashboards and Reports.

By consolidating all of their marketing data into UQube, this company was able to view live data immediately, gaining insight into their spend across regions, brands and vendors.

UQube was the right solution because it was a secure environment that everyone could simultaneously access and edit information within that could be configured by the company to meet their specific needs for naming and organizing data.

UQube Hospitality

Budgeting & Finance

Locations

90+ Countries

Customer Quote

“We didn’t realize how vulnerable we were before UQube. We knew doing retrospective forecasting wasn’t great, but we didn’t have a better tool!”

www.upperquadrant.com sales@upperquadrant.com Phone: 703.476.1992

Before UQube, this company was heavily reliant on sharing financial information by Excel spreadsheets through email, internal systems and portals. On average, one team member (on each of the teams across the world) was responsible for collecting numerous spreadsheets from their team, standardizing the information and then delivering it to headquarters. Headquarters would collect all of these summary data spreadsheets and further standardize the information before they could begin analysis.

This process was slow and difficult for each of the responsible team members, and despite best efforts, the regionally consolidated information was populated with errors – a result of a complex manual task and an inflexible system.

The collection process took the company approximately 2 weeks each time they wanted to perform an analysis. That meant that the process of identifying their budget versus forecast versus actual was not only error-ridden, but also time-consuming.

A 2-week delay in processing meant that headquarters was always reviewing historical information, not live. Effectively, this data was bad because it wasn’t a true reflection of current financial standings.

This company needed:

§ A process to rapidly share live information across the world

§ Simultaneous access of data § Protection/Permissions for

sensitive financial data between different groups

By moving all the company’s manual entry into the cloud inside of UQube, they were able to significantly reduce the number of errors present (previously a result of manual reconsolidation and standardization). UQube modernized their collection process while remaining sensitive to their needs and desires for configurability and flexibility.

Problems Needing Remedy:

§ Version Control § Collection format standardization § Single user access § Overwriting § Lockouts for editing § Information privacy and permissions

UQube Features:

§ A simultaneous-user environment § Row/Column level editing (timed

lock outs for users) § Row/Column level permissions § Grid permissions § Multiple-user personalized views

UQube was able to integrate with PeopleSoft (financial software) pairing invoices with manual entry spend data through datasets presented in live dashboards and reports.

These dashboards and reports were easy to share with senior leadership and provided instantaneous insights into budget vs. forecast vs. actual – allowing them to keep a more accurate pulse on marketing spend throughout the year.

It also allowed them to create live snapshots that allowed them to compare different historical data on activities and spend.

Challenge Manual Processes are Time Consuming, Error Prone and Provide Delayed/Limited Insight

Solution Worldwide Data Entry Standardized with Live Snapshots and Reports

Result Save Time, Money and Eliminate Frustration

Every dollar that this company spends on marketing is tracked and managed through UQube. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by this company annually between its 11 brands and franchises.

UQube has become the company’s standard tool for marketing data collection. UQube helps this company to gather, track, report and analyze key metrics to better plan and organize marketing spend.

Benefits from implementing UQube:

§ Faster Reporting • Greatly reduced reporting

efforts and time involved preparing analyses

§ Saved Time and Money • Decreased man-hours

spent aggregating and standardizing data

§ Improved Communication • Increased transparency of

marketing activities between multiple locations and HQ

§ Increased Awareness • Drastically increased

awareness of synergistic marketing activities, decreasing duplicate efforts

Because of UQube, headquarters is now able to see all of their brands’, franchises’, and locations’ marketing activities in UQube alongside their budget vs. forecast vs. actual in dashboards and reports in real time.

In short, UQube helps the company report on the data that they are generating – fast.

“Not only are we saving ourselves 2 weeks of delay time waiting for reports, our employees are happier using a tool that makes their jobs easier, and we’re happier that HQ gets better data faster!”