The Magic Wand Question: Building Digital Night Audit (and Hotel Tech That Matters) - Brian Blanda & Stephen German, Actabl [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: On this show, we talk a lot about the potential of technology to free up people working in hotels so they can provide hospitality. Today in this episode, we're exploring a very specific way to do that in a way that brings this idea to life. Today, Actabl is launching Digital Night Audit, a product that has been years in the making. Actabl's Stephen German and Brian Banda are joining us to talk about what the night audit process looks like in general for those who are new to the business, what challenges they saw and wanted to fix, and how they went about creating a better way to do this. We then get into this product at the end, but I encourage you to keep listening because the process that they describe is one that everyone can learn from because it will help you get more out of technology. So without further ado, let's get into it. 

[intro music]

Josiah: One of the reasons I joined Actabl was I wanted to get closer to people who are building technology that makes the work of hospitality better, more enjoyable, frees up time to do some of the most meaningful parts of hospitality. What we're going to be talking about today is a great example of that. So I appreciate you both making time to talk. Tell me, I know you guys are working on a lot, but why did you decide to focus on building a product around night audit? How did this all come to be?

Stephen: So Night Audit has had a storied history, but when it first hit my radar was a couple of years ago. I was at a hotel in Boston, and we were working on our housekeeping and engineering solution together. As we were finishing up some of our research, I stopped the assistant general manager, and I asked her, hey, if you had a magic wand, what is the one thing that you could fix, that you could do differently? She got kind of a sly smile, and she said, here, I want to show you something. She took me into the back office and said, you know, every night as part of this night audit process, I print off somewhere around 50 or 60 pieces of paper for all these reports. I then go through and I write on them and I redline them and I pass it over to the GM and then I have to scan it all back in and send it as an email as well. If anyone has a problem with it, if anyone wants to change anything, I have to print it all out again and I have to start all over. I just thought to myself, wow, that is an incredible amount of manual effort. That seems like something we should be able to do something about and something that we should be able to solve. So sometime later, when we were working through ProfitSword, we came to the realization, you know, we have a lot of this information. We could make this all digital. We could make that printing a thing of the past. We could actually make that magic wish a reality. That's what we've been working towards.

Josiah: So I guess, as you think about night audit, what were some of the problems that you wanted to solve in that process?

Stephen: Absolutely. So some of the big problems that we had outside of just the paper was you needed the ability to leave the comments and the ability to sign off and go through multiple approvals. From a management company level, from above property, you also needed the ability and the confidence to know that this was being done and have an easy way to tell which hotels had completed it, which hotels were missing, or which hotels needed review so that you could quickly action on them. In addition to just the normal problems that night auditors have, those are some of the key ones that we heard from the manual paper processes.

Josiah: I love it. Brian, anything else to add to that or things that you're especially proud of with this launch?

Brian: I'm extremely proud that I think we really nail the problems that Stephen has outlined. The solution that we've come up with was really thinking it from a user's perspective and making sure that we're solving those issues first and foremost, and then expanding on that. I think it was mentioned earlier, you don't want to create a product that's looking for a problem, right? We are identifying the problem and creating a product to directly solve that.

Josiah: I love it. Now, I wonder if we could take our listeners a little bit behind the scenes around how technology products get developed in the world of hospitality, Stephen, and building on that. So I love the, you know, question, if you had a magic wand, what would you fix? How would you build something here? Take our listeners a little bit behind the scenes, you know, so you have sort of this realization, there's something that could be built when you're running product. I want people to get a sense of what do you do then? What are some of the next steps to take that from an idea into what we're launching today? We're going to talk about this in a few moments, but today at Actabl, we're launching an offering in this area. But how do you go from point A to point B?

Stephen: It starts with the process. It starts with just mapping out what is done today and why. You don't want to rebuild just everything that is done today, because that's usually not the best or fastest way to do it. There's usually something, there's usually an aha moment or something that can make it speed up. But it starts with you have to truly understand what are the ins and outs of it, and how procedurally does this all move together. Once you know that, once you understand that, then you start circling, here's all the things that are really painful, and you start working with your engineering team to say, what can the technology do? What is possible that maybe we haven't considered? How can we make this flow better? We spin up some designs, and then we start shopping them with the end user. We start showing them, hey, if you had this, if it looked like this, if it functioned like this, is that something, would that solve the problem? Would that make it better? And continuing to iterate until we get to something that we think is, we both, both the customers and us think is great, then we're good to move forward and start building it.

Josiah: I want to expand on a little bit of what you said there, because I, in general, over my career, I've tried to move the conversation away from this sort of client-vendor relationship when it comes to hotel tech, because I've seen across different companies, different contexts, it seems that the most productive relationships are really much more like partnerships, which is easy to say, but it requires time investment on all parties to actually do. I know you and your teams do a lot to spend time with the hoteliers that we're serving. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the importance of that for a lot of hoteliers listening to this. You know, why invest time in this example of speaking with you and your teams in the product formation process? Because I think that may be interesting to dig into a little bit.

Stephen: So the scariest thing about being on the software side is building a solution in search of a problem. If you've done that, you've wasted a huge amount of time and no one's happy. Customer isn't happy. You're not happy. Everything just works against itself. You have to have that two-way conversation, both with the customer of what do they need and with what is possible. Because if you're not in that conversation, you're in your ivory tower. No one is very successful sat on their own in their ivory tower. They build things that don't work or that meet an idealized version of what a hotelier is doing that doesn't actually solve the problem. So that partnership is critical to figuring out does your idea, does this way of solving the problem actually solve the problem? Or are there other things hidden underneath the surface that maybe we're not aware of that are just going to be further frustrating as we start to build it out?

Josiah: Yeah. Well, I mean, to that point, I've gotten to know you and your teams a fair amount in the time that I've been here at Actabl. And what I really appreciate is the time you've invested in the product development process, right? Discovering what are the problems, how might we solve for this? Today at Actabl, we're launching Digital Night Audit. This has been in the works for years. I'm so excited that this is live. And I wonder, Brian, if you could explain a little bit about what this is.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So understanding the manual task and the labor it takes and, you know, the amount of paper simply and space it takes for the night audit. Our goal is to digitize this and we hit on very few key aspects of this. So first we make a portfolio wide visibility for all the night audit packets. GMs and leadership can see submissions across properties in real time as they are getting complete. We track all the submissions and the edits and the comments and approvals that would happen through a night audit process. We have instant access, so if you need a packet from six months ago, let's say, you can just search through the digitized files and you can get access exactly to what you want, rather than perhaps going into a closet or storage unit to find what you're looking for. We have customized automation, so tailored workflows for the property type and the brand standards, which is in the customer's control and how they want that to be. And there's a tremendous amount of time savings through trying to pass these paper packets typically from one person to the next, or scanning and sending them to a corporate office that becomes readily available for all users. And, you know, a really great benefit of this is the eco friendly. You're not printing all of these reports. You're saving not only money on the ink and paper, but you're saving trees and not wasting all of these paper for something that you're just storing for years and years. You may only look at a handful of times.

Josiah: I love it, Brian, because I think, you know, sometimes in hospitality, we talk about technology freeing people up, and it seems a little bit vague until they get into the details of this. And so hearing the way that you and Stephen have approached developing this product is exciting. This is very tangible, right? That night audit process already is kind of tough because you're working through the night, right? But then it's all the printing. It's all the reviewing. It's all the, you know, copy creation, all the stuffing of envelopes. Very, very time consuming and kind of mundane. And then I had the chance to see you demo the product a few days ago, and just was really struck by the simplicity and how fast it was. And so I think this is how you, you know, our mission here is to empower people who power hospitality. This is a really tangible way to do that.

Brian: Yeah, I would agree. I think putting a lot of something that can be nebulous and different and varies from property to property, when you're thinking from a management company's perspective and being able to standardize that and have some confidence in that process and knowing that you're standardizing, but standardizing to your requirements, I think carries a tremendous amount of value and benefit.

Josiah: One thing I've talked about on the show in the past weeks is, I guess, the opportunity of digitizing processes. And I think this is a fantastic example of this. I mean, this question could be for you, Brian, or for you, Stephen, but I'm curious some of the maybe non-obvious benefits of doing something like this. So, yeah, you know, what else do you see here that maybe listeners should know about digitizing a process like this?

Stephen: One that's underneath the surface is process at scale is hard, and change management is hard. Say you want to start collecting something, you want to start looking at something different, or you want to incorporate a new step across all of your portfolio. How do you do that? Today, everyone tends to have a printed version of that checklist at their desk that they just go through. If you want to know that this has actually been changed, that you've actually done that, you need a mechanism that is the same and is standardized across all of your hotels. And the other benefit is you have that transparency and you have that culture of accountability and confidence, too, that the work is getting done the way that it needs to get done, and you're able to go back and look at the results. And God forbid that you ever end up in an audit or end up needing to find anything in that mountain of paperwork, the digital solution now lets you find that very, very quickly and lets you have that in for posterity. You don't need to go into a storage unit and look for the box labeled whatever year. You can look it up through the file system.

Brian: Yeah, I would say as someone who's managed a property and had to go through internal audits and a big part of that is pulling very specific reports from very specific days. And, you know, before the internal auditor outlines exactly what they're looking for, and then you have to spend time to go hunt them down and figure out where they are and hope you and your team have organized everything well enough to be able to find it relatively quickly. And this really allows it to just be relatively instantaneous. You go in, you search for those documents, and it's surprising that it's taken this long to make this big of a leap in that progress.

Josiah: I'm really excited to see this come out, not only for the time savings, but for some of the reasons that you mentioned. I also have this theory, and you guys are so close to technology and it being built, that I'd love to just sanity check this with you. But, I mean, AI seems to present interesting opportunities. I have sort of this working theory, though, that maybe a bigger focus for more people needs to be digitizing workflows like these. Just to get documents, processes in a place where there's data that's collected. And then, you know, maybe one day you can apply AI to that. But it kind of feels like some of the conversation in the hotel tech is skipping, you know, to this point of just chatbots and not the processes. I guess, broadly speaking, do you think that might be something for our listeners to think about, digitizing more workflows like this?

Stephen: Absolutely. Data is at the core of anything AI. You need that history. You need that track record. It is much easier to train your AI with that history and with that information. And another thing that you're probably going to want to see is if as you're making AI investments and adding those tools, too, is what's the delta? What's the change? Has it gotten better? Is it worse? Is it worth leaning into? And having the data, having that history, you have to start somewhere, and digitizing it gives you that foundation that lets you move into the 21st and 22nd century.

Brian: Yeah, I would say a major component of what a successful hotel is looking for is their ability to be timely and responsive to their guests or to the market data or to the rates in which they're posting. And a big aspect of being able to do that efficiently is digitizing that information, having access with that information. And more importantly, be able to action on the information that's in front of you and have the workflow digitized in such a way that it allows the right people to have the right information at the right time. And without digitizing that, it can be cumbersome. It takes time. There's opportunities for human error. And anytime we can digitize that, I think a hotel is served better.

Josiah: Amazing. Thank you both for taking time to talk today. Encourage everyone who is listening to this is interested. Check out the links in the show notes will include some links where we can learn more about Digital Night Audit from Actabl, going live today. Very excited about it. Also, if you're at HITEC next week, come say hello. We will be there as well and would love to see you there. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.