We use it for unattended automation and attended automation.
We are working on automating a lot of the support processes that we do within our call centers which are very repetitive. In addition, there are rates and pricing in another area where we have introduced automation. We have some automated processes running multiple times a day to evaluate rates, provide reporting, and perform rate updates, as needed, without human intervention.
We are also looking at streamlining some areas on our franchise side, where we are building properties out in our systems and updating their property information. Therefore, we are looking at those components, as well as the onboarding of new hotels.
It has benefited our organization through automated rates and pricing. We built an automated rate system that runs four times a day. Our initial analytics coming back from that rate system for a single two-day period in July performed over 25,000 individual rate changes across just under 600 hotels.
With this volume of activity, there is no way that we could hire enough revenue managers to perform those volume of rate changes. This rate system has allowed us to be more responsive and competitive with our rates with less human involvement. It is leaving our revenue managers free to work with properties, identify special events where things might want to be increased, etc., rather than spending their time updating rates. Instead, they can now just submit a special event and what they want the rates to be, then the system will adopt these into the existing strategy that is being implemented automatically.
It has been straightforward and smooth to use this solution for the full-cycle of automation from the discovery of processes to turning on the automation and scaling it up. We have three dedicated environments: development, UAT, and production. We build things out, then test them in development. It is very easy for us to transition them out of development into user acceptance testing. Once our users are happy, it is a very easy, seamless process for us to transfer that into production, enable the triggers, and turn it on. The ease of being able to bring things into production and through the development cycle is quite straightforward.
This solution has helped our existing workforce embrace the digital transformation of our organization. We have multiple departments currently coming up to us, and saying, "Hey, when can we meet and talk about things? We have things we want to automate." We have other departments starting to to reach out and show an interest in having parts of their processes streamlined or automated. For example, one of the processes that we are working on automating would be a hotel room type of change. So, if a hotel has a bunch of rooms in their hotel, and they want to transform them into a different room type, it is a very long, slow process. It's very monotonous and repetitive. This is a really good candidate for automation. Right now, we are working with that department to automate that specific process. For them to do it by hand right now, it takes them almost a full seven days to perform, but with automation, we can do it in almost half that time. These type of requests happen regularly. Therefore, there are more of them to do than there are people. This automation will allow us to perform the requests that we have faster, but also keep up with future requests.
When we approach the departments about automation, we put a high stress that the solution is complimentary and will elevate the human workforce. This way they can do the more important things while not having to worry about filling out an Excel spreadsheet with 600 fields. Most of them, when they hear that they won't have to fill out all those fields anymore and they'll just have to worry about the more important aspects of it, they typically end up pretty happy. They seem to be pretty receptive to it. However, you'll always run into a few people who will have the concern that automation might take their jobs, but it hasn't happened so far.
With any of the processes that we have deployed, the accuracy and rate of errors coming back is much lower than what we would typically see. There have been a lot less things going through the automation that we need to adjust, fix after the fact, or touch manually.