Because the DOF should help define the evidence before the hotel starts collecting it.
Wait until renewal and you’ll find out that “savings” meant freed-up time, “revenue” meant contract value and nobody wrote down how long setup took. The hotel may have improved something real and recorded it in a way Finance can’t use.
I’d much rather have that conversation while the pilot can still be set up properly.
Agree on the costs up front
Include setup, fees, staff prep time, training and upkeep. Mark which items are real money out the door and which are staff time assigned a value.
Let Finance approve the hourly cost assumptions and how they’re treated. Don’t hand them a number from a salary website and hope.
Define what counts as a benefit
Keep these apart: expenses you actually avoided, staff time freed up, the value of the opportunities involved, and any revenue you can credibly say wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Agree on what evidence would support each.
Saving fifteen minutes of prep per proposal is measurable. It isn’t fifteen minutes of payroll saved unless somebody’s schedule actually changed. Keep that difference from the first observation.
Our pilot scorecard is a practical starting structure.
Pick a comparison the hotel can keep up with
Decide which opportunities count, how complex they are, the time window and who writes down the work. Keep the sample sizes and the gaps visible.
Don’t design data collection the staff can’t sustain. A few reliable observations beat a big pile of guesses.
Keep Finance’s role proportionate: approve the assumptions, name the question that matters and agree on review dates. The DOF doesn’t need to sit in on every site visit.
Agree now that a partial result is allowed
The pilot might show better prep and clearer proposals while the revenue impact stays unknown. Decide ahead of time whether that result would justify continuing, or a revised test.
The renewal meeting should be about what the hotel learned, not a fight over what the words in the report meant. Bringing Finance in early makes the evidence something everyone can stand behind.
