Whitbread improves business intelligence

Premier Inn is one of Whitbread's businesses

Hospitality group Whitbread has reorganised its reporting set-up to gain a better and more timely view of business activity.

The group, owner of businesses such as Premier Inn hotel and Costa Coffee, had previously been handling data from different sources without fully exploiting its Oracle system's ability to sort this, according to IS and change director Andrew Brothers.

“We wanted a timely overview of business performance, we also have a depository of data that we wanted to make available to departments such as finance, sales and marketing,” said Brothers.

“The [new set-up] also needed a scalable platform, since we are expanding quickly,” he said.

Hitachi Consulting supported the firm in scoping the project, which involved the upgrade to the Oracle 10g database, and also on design work. The entire project cost around £2.5m.

Brothers, previously a procurement director, has been promoted to the top IT post in September after his predecessor Ben Wishart became chief operating officer for the firm’s international business.