Business Sensor targets gaps in hospitality industry with ERP solution

By Ugonnabo Ngwu

 It has emerged that technology cannot be separated from the hospitality business, and that hoteliers who fail to adopt innovative solutions into their systems and processes risk surrendering to competition. 

This was the argument of the Chief Executive Officer of Business Sensor, Abayomi Omosewo, during an interaction with brandish.africa, citing the booking of rooms and the balancing of the books as case studies.

According to him, “Technology has come to stay. There is no way you can do the hospitality business without technology. If you look at the booking system, you need technology to be able to do that.” 

He decried the situation where most hotels in Nigeria run on disjointed software, arguing that this doesn’t make for an efficient operation. 

Stressing that it is counterproductive and costly for businesses to have different applications for room booking, accounting, sales or inventory, the techie disclosed that this gap led his company to develop a unified system to the hotel industry.

Their endeavour resulted in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software which integrates everything typical of a hotel operation, from finance, reservations to inventory management. It started with an accounting foundation but now has other modules built into it to realise the goal of businesses having one system, one control in one software. 

Apart from integrating the chart of accounts that suits any kind of business, the software has an inbuilt capability to assimilate more features which will all meet up at the accounting level.

With the ERP, Omosewo disclosed that managers of hotels don’t have to wait until the close of business before rooms are billed or audit is done. Once a sales person posts anything, it goes straight to the accounting system. 

“When you make any stock-based operation, it is going to deduct from the stock inventory and balance immediately. This means that you can have your profit and loss account real time. You don’t have to wait until the end of the month before you see your books.

“Our system also has a booking interface where people can book and it gets integrated with the local system,” the Chief Technology Officer said.  

Calculation of tax remittances is another area where the ERP software pays dividend. It tells the specific tax that each country is expected to pay. “Whatever country you are, if you want to compute your tax, our AI will source the tax system in your country and put it into the system for you. The software identifies the official taxes payable by hotels in any country. It pulls this into the system.”
Omosewo said further, “When stakeholders turn in their reports, AI analyses it and points out areas that need improvement. Our AI helps organisations to quickly set up.

 “Data is not mixed. If you sign up, our software automatically creates a data system for you that you can back up that is updated every day. You can download that backup and keep for yourself. You can have your data in a private cloud hosting. We use Azure hosting, which is a cloud system. It means that you can access it from anywhere.“

Having been a player in the digital space for over 15 years, Business Sensor “developed the technology in-house. We are based in both Canada and Nigeria. So, it is still foreign but 100 per cent Nigerian.”