Case study: Eden Rock Saint Barth Hotel & Villas

[Bulbthings] Eden Rock is one of the iconic hotels of Oetker Collection, a collection of palaces. Can you tell us more about this very special world of ultra luxury?

[Heifara Marakai, Purchasing Director] The Oetker Collection Group is an ensemble of 12 exceptional hotels around the world. Located in exclusive destinations, these establishments are synonymous with excellent hospitality combined with unrivaled know-how and a family spirit, values ​​dear to Oetker Collection. Our hotel, Eden Rock Saint-Barth is itself legendary due to its history, its position on a promontory rock in the turquoise bay of Saint-Jean and guests who have stayed there such as John Lennon (our Rock Star villa is dedicated to him). We offer a 5-star service with the particular charm of the French West Indies and we constantly surpass ourselves to ensure that each of our visitors’ stays is tailor-made and totally unique.

How did the need for an equipment tracking system arise? Why did you choose Bulbthings?

We have the particularity of having a main hotel and offering a fully equipped hotel service to more than 200 luxury villas located on the island. Our furniture and equipment stock is therefore very distributed with frequent movements. Being located on an island, we also have constraints on our supply, so we need a real-time view of our stock (furniture, equipment but also consumer products, fresh groceries etc.) in order to optimise it and anticipate orders. The department (logistics and purchasing) for which I am responsible needed a modern, simple and flexible solution to allow us to track our inventory and stock in real time.

We consulted several software providers and preferred Bulbthings because we were looking for software that is both easy to use for our teams but also complete and flexible enough to adapt to our internal processes. We have been using Bulbthings for two years, we are very satisfied and consider the Bulbthings team as a true partner in the digitalisation of all our historically manual and tedious processes. We started with the most critical processes and will soon expand to others, such as the maintenance of the main hotel and villas.

Service and human touch are essential in your sector. What role does digitalisation play in your organisation?

Indeed, the human touch of our team of butlers, concierges, private chefs etc. makes all the difference, but technology can help them offer a better service to our customers. For example, an up-to-date inventory and digitalised guest orders preparation flows allow us to better prepare arrivals and inform the guest in real time about the availability of equipment and products requested during their stay.
It goes without saying that this allows us to automate certain time-consuming back office tasks and increases our productivity.

What benefits (quantitative and qualitative) have you gained from it so far?

Firstly, we are now making very big savings (that’s several tens of thousands of euros per year), thanks to the sharp drop in the number of forgotten or lost equipment in the villas. We have significantly gained in productivity thanks to real-time communication between the customer-facing teams (butler, concierges, private chefs etc.), the logistics team and the billing team.
Finally, this has contributed to better customer service by avoiding oversights and having visibility on the availability of equipment and products that customers order from us to fully enjoy their stay.

Are there any favorite features or usage tips that you would like to share with the community?

There are several! I will only mention the most essential ones for our operation.
Our teams are constantly traveling all over the island. The collaboration features (team discussions with photos, a bit like Whatsapp but in a more organised and traceable way) and the mobile application are particularly practical for us. Thus, when an order is ready, the application sends a notification to the butlers and concierge teams with the photo of the packages to be collected.

Also very important: the management of very granular roles and permissions that allows the application to be customised according to the user group, because we have a lot of stakeholders (internal and external) who collaborate with Bulbthings.

More generally, we also appreciate the customisation possibilities offered by their platform. This allowed us to customise the standard features to adapt to our more complex processes. We understood the full potential of their “low code” platform and undertook to digitilise other very time-consuming processes such as the management of supplier orders and deliveries or more specific activities, such as the preparation of our breakfast orders in the villa. They have a public API/SDK offering that allows their customers to carry out these developments with their IT teams, but we appreciate the passion, creativity and responsive support of their team.

Finally, the various reporting and analytics features allow us to optimise our stock and control our costs.