Electronics by Design - Minibarmaster
The Challenge
In the early 2000’s, Electronics By Design saw an opportunity to revolutionise the hotel industry. The challenge was to develop a more efficient, cost-saving way to record minibar usage in hotels by eliminating the traditional pen and paper system. The traditional method resulted in lost revenue through incorrect billing to guests and reduced accuracy in stock control.
Our Approach
Electronics By Design started with the voice of customer to understand the key issues and pain points. We held many close discussions with hotel clients to truly understand the requirements and devise ways to solve them efficiently.
We then held trials across a variety of hotels with a wide variety of minibar systems and operations in order to develop a system that can work across all these variables.
The Solution
Minibarmaster was launched in 2004. It was quickly adopted across many hotels in Australia and this Australian grown innovation continued to feature in hotels for almost 20 years.
The solution was to develop an innovative, electronic wireless system to record, manage, report and post minibar sales to guest accounts. Custom software written for an Android handheld to allow staff to record sales, manage use-by-dates and other minibar centric requirements. Back end software to provide analytics and interfacing to the client’s in house software systems to post the charges to rooms.
The Crowne Plaza Melbourne estimated that annual savings were in the order of $35k, with a ROI of 6 months payback period.
At a time when IoT was in its infancy, this demonstrates Electronics By Design vision to disrupt the status quo and bring technology to the forefront of its clients.