Merritt Installs Aptech's Business Intelligence Solutions

Merritt uses BI solutions to gather, analyze daily data from 31 properties

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. October 14, 2008

PITTSBURGH, PA, August 1, 2006. Merritt Hospitality, the wholly owned operating subsidiary of growing hotel ownership company HEI Hospitality, has installed the Execuvue(R) business intelligence and Targetvue(R) Internet-based enterprise planning applications, from Aptech Computer Systems, Inc. Aptech is the hospitality industry's leading provider of customized hotel computer systems for business intelligence and accounting. The installation enables Merritt Hospitality to automate key financial reporting and analysis functions, implement flexible budgets and forecasts, centrally manage the planning process, and set objectives for all properties to increase profitability and achieve business goals.

"We're a fast-growing company -- having expanded from 18 to 31 properties in the last 24 months and, going forward, setting our sights on investing approximately $500 million in acquisitions annually," said Scott Ambs, Senior Vice President Finance at Merritt Hospitality. "Our business has scaled up to a point where we needed an advanced automated budgeting solution to achieve our profitability goals. Aptech's Execuvue and Targetvue -- integrated and working together -- enable us to easily gather data from all of our properties on a daily basis, display and analyze each property's results, and set performance expectations based on the comparative data from all of our hotels."

Ambs noted that the Aptech applications play a key role in management decision-making at Merritt Hospitality. "A major benefit of Execuvue and Targetvue are to enable us to identify and analyze key operating indicators at each property. Armed with that business intelligence, we can quickly attack need areas and export the strengths as best practices to all of our hotels."

The automated business intelligence (BI) capabilities of Execuvue and Targetvue strongly support the first provision of Merritt Hospitality's Mission Statement: Make Your Numbers. . . In making our numbers, we mean all the metrics by which we choose to judge ourselves. Explained Ambs, "We're a highly analytical company that evaluates performance many different ways with all of our hotels. Previously, our budgeting approach was to manually extract data from many different spreadsheets and consolidate them into a master spreadsheet, with all of the potential for rekeying and formula errors that approach entailed. Now, with Execuvue and Targetvue, we have automated analytical tools for drilling down into our operations and making comparisons by ownership group, by brand, by regions, and other criteria. The result: greater insight for new ways to 'make our numbers.'"

Execuvue and Targetvue automate enterprise planning and budgeting

Aptech's Execuvue and Targetvue work in concert to give hotel operators everything they need to drive true Performance Management that combines goal planning, effectiveness monitoring, and real-time performance analysis.

Execuvue is an Internet-enabled enterprise business intelligence application for large and small hotel companies that coordinates data from various corporate systems, including Smith Travel Research, into accessible information with familiar Windows simplicity. Targetvue is a budgeting application that can be used as a free-standing enterprise planning tool by one property, a hotel group, or multi-flag management company. Targetvue lets operators build flexible operating budgets and set goals for various aspects of their enterprise and can also link those goals to Execuvue.

As a company's performance changes each day, Execuvue monitors the fluctuations and compares them with budgets and goals created in Targetvue. The result is an automated real-time heads-up display of business performance measured against operating goals. Targetvue is accessible via a secured on-line connection so operators are able to input property data and check performance anytime from any location.