One event, six pairs of hands: why we are building Ortavio

The idea for Ortavio came from Aurel on our team. He comes from the hospitality industry and knows the everyday work of a venue from the inside. With us, he turned it into software. The problems Ortavio is meant to solve are best shown by following a single event on its way through a venue.

It starts with an e-mail. A company is looking for a room on 19 November for an innovation workshop: 40 people, group work in the afternoon and catering throughout the day. An everyday enquiry for any hotel or seminar venue.

By the time this workshop has taken place and been paid for, it has passed through many hands. Look closely and you count at least six.

The first pair of hands: sales

The enquiry lands in the inbox. Whoever handles it checks the room plan to see whether anything is free on the 19th. The room plan might be an Excel sheet, a calendar or a folder at reception. A plenary room for 40 is available, plus three breakout rooms are needed for the afternoon.

Then the quote is written, often in Word, copied from the last similar one. The prices for rooms and the day package come from a price list that is hopefully up to date. Whether the event pays off, nobody knows exactly at this point.

The second pair of hands: the check

In many venues a second person reviews the quote before it goes out. That makes sense, but they receive it as an e-mail attachment. Whether they checked the right version only becomes clear when something is wrong.

The third pair of hands: room planning

The customer accepts, by e-mail. Now the four rooms have to be firmly reserved. If one of them has been given to someone else in the meantime, because the reservation only existed in someone’s head or inbox, the worst case is that nobody notices until the morning of the workshop.

The fourth pair of hands: the kitchen

The kitchen plans with the number of guests it knows about. If the quote says 40 but the customer’s last e-mail says 45, and nobody passed the change on, five lunches are missing at noon.

The fifth pair of hands: technical staff and housekeeping

Projector, flipcharts, rows of chairs or group tables: it is all somewhere in the banquet order. Whether that is the current version depends on who last worked on it.

The sixth pair of hands: accounting

At the end, everything has to go on the invoice: rooms, catering, the extra aperitif that was added over the phone. Accounting pieces the invoice together from the quote, the banquet order and individual e-mails. Whatever is not written down there does not get invoiced.

The pattern behind it

None of these people does anything wrong. The problem lies in the handovers. Each pair of hands works with its own copy of the event, and every change has to be passed on manually to everyone else. The more hands, the more places where something can get lost.

This is exactly where Ortavio comes in. The event exists only once, and everyone works with the same version:

• Enquiry: Whoever records the enquiry gets suitable rooms suggested, with the room plan in view.
• Quote: The costing runs alongside, including the contribution margin, before the quote goes out.
• Check: Review by a second person is part of the process. The quote is only sent once they have approved it.
• Confirmation: When the customer accepts, the rooms are firmly booked and the accepted quote becomes the event that the kitchen, housekeeping and accounting all see.
• Guest numbers: The event carries a guaranteed number with a deadline and a tolerance. How many guests are coming is recorded in one place, not in the last e-mail.
• Invoice: It is created from the event itself, with a QR payment slip, and contains what was actually booked.

A short video on the Ortavio product page shows what this path looks like in the application. The workshop in it is the same as in this article; the company and the people are fictitious. You will also find individual steps from it in the picture gallery below.

Why a software company builds its own products

Our core business is customer portals and software that we develop with and for our customers. In doing so, we see that some tasks are similar across many businesses. The processes are not identical, but the problems are: scattered data, manual handovers, changes that do not reach everyone.

Where a problem looks the same in many businesses, it is worth turning it into a product that everyone can use, instead of solving it from scratch each time. VisualNumbers, our software for budgeting as a team, is one such product. Ortavio is the second. This time the industry knowledge came from within our own team: Aurel brought his experience from hospitality, and we contributed the platform and the craft to turn it into software for many businesses.

Both are built on nova Core, the same platform on which we build custom solutions. Sign-in, billing and multi-tenancy are already solved there. That lets us concentrate on what defines a product in its domain. And whatever we improve in a product also benefits the custom solutions through the platform.

Getting to know Ortavio

Ortavio is modular and can be put together as the “Hotel pur”, “Seminar & Event” or “Campus komplett” package. We migrate your existing data for you. If you would like to see what the journey of an event could look like in your business, you can request a personal demo on ortavio.com.