As early as 2016, Naumi Hotels was ready to pursue a rapid expansion strategy that would take them from their flagship establishment in Singapore to a total of seven properties around the Asia-Pacific region, bringing its personalised hospitality experiences to guests in Australia and New Zealand as well.

However, the hospitality label was managing their operations with a basic accounting software and a different financial system at the time, neither of which were sufficient for their growing business needs. Their legacy setup lacked various features necessary to support their expansion plans, such as:

• Automatic PO generation
• Financial consolidation
• Financial reports
• Management reports

Moreover, Naumi Hotel's staff still had to manually process financial data with the accounting software, which slowed down their report generation and delayed the decision-making process of their key shareholders.

To properly support their regional expansion plans, Naumi Hotels needed a solution that can resolve the challenges of regional expansion - such as compliance with tax codes in different countries - was easily scalable, and could secure their critical business data against unauthorised access.

In 2018, Naumi Hotels began working with AFON IT in their search for a suitable solution, thanks to our expertise in the field of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

“AFON went to much effort to understand our needs thoroughly, and suggested changes to the implementation that were more cost effective for our budget,” said Angelica Diloy, the Group Financial Controller, Operations of Naumi Hotels Pte Ltd

Based on the business needs that were identified, Naumi Hotels eventually decided on Oracle NetSuite, as the true Cloud ERP software offered ease of use, an intuitive design, and potential for scalability, and had the necessary features to support their regional expansion plan.

“We went with NetSuite OneWorld as it could be fully deployed within 3 to 5 months, and had all the features we’d need to manage the financial accounting of multiple establishments in various locations,” said Mandy Kwa, the Accountant of Naumi Hotels Pte Ltd.

Angelica and Mandy, who was part of the Naumi Hotels team double their hat as project managers and team lead and worked together with AFON IT on the NetSuite OneWorld deployment project, went to great lengths in order to get buy-in from every stakeholder in the group.

With the deployment of Oracle NetSuite, Naumi Hotels gained full visibility into their financial data, and could now generate error-free financial reports in a third of the time they used to take. This allowed the stakeholders of the hotel group to make informed business decisions more promptly than before.

NetSuite also supported compliance with the tax codes of different jurisdictions, as well as automatic elimination of intercompany transactions. This helped Naumi Hotels halve the time they needed to complete financial consolidation of the multiple establishment’s accounts within the organisation, especially with regulatory compliance automatically factored into the process. 

The implementation of NetSuite also paid dividends for Naumi Hotels when the COVID-19 pandemic struck a heavy blow to the global hospitality industry in 2020. Although the hotel group endured its share of the impact from the pandemic, the cloud-based ERP platform helped its staff to make a smooth transition to work-from-home (WFH) arrangements.

“Thanks to NetSuite, we are able to tap on the financial data and forecasting in real-time and anywhere we are, especially now that many of us are working from home. We’re able to update our shareholders and stakeholders via NetSuite on the core requirements of our employees, and shape the operational strategy of Naumi Hotels during these challenging times,” Angelica added.

“We’d also like to thank AFON for the initiative they took to address any issues we encountered, and the effort they put in to ensure the eventual success of the NetSuite implementation project.”