A short video discussion in which Fourth (a hospitality software company) describes its origins in back-office labour and cost-of-goods management, its use of Salesforce across growth from ~3–4 people in 2000 to ~350 employees, and a joint project with Salesforce Success Services to build a scalable procurement platform for a large global hotel group. Speakers emphasize improved forecasting, end-user-focused procurement experiences, and ambitions to scale the solution globally.
Chapters
Working at Forth means being involved in the hospitality industry.
We started out in 2000 to provide back office applications, solely focusing on managing the labour cost and the cost of goods. If you haven't got those under control, you can build and cook the best food and you can make the best cocktails, but you're ultimately not going to be successful.
We have our customers forecast pretty damn well based on that forecast. They can then decide how many people, how much stock, what recipes, what menus they need to provide at any particular time of the day. So by doing that right, they can save an awful lot of money.
So we've been using Salesforce internally for all of our processes, from three or four people back in 2000 to about 350 odd people today. It is so embedded, everything we do. I couldn't imagine a scenario where we are not using Salesforce.
Fourth and Salesforce have had a very long relationship, but I think we see a lot more benefit from using it as part of our.
A large global hotel group wanted to deploy a whole new procurement platform for all their hotels managed and franchised globally.
Fourth pitched for this tender and was a proof of concept, but it included all the elements that we believe they would find exciting. And guess what they did then. With the help of Salesforce and Success Services, we were able to build the solution that was better than the prototype.
We really created a seamless experience, not just for Fourth customers, but for their customers as well. We really connected the experience from end users to business to technology to achieve these business transforming solutions for the hospitality industry.
Working with Katie and the rest of the team on that process was quite a revelation. It really felt like we were working together on this, but being very strongly guided by the experts.
If you think about the procurement process for businesses, for corporations, it was a pretty stale experience. Yet on the other side of the fence in the consumer world, it's a better experience to buy now through your mobile phone than going down to the shop in most cases. So when we started to think through that, the idea was really quite simple. Why can't we make buying procuring, doing stuff that you do in a hotel, in a bar, in a restaurant, why shouldn't that be as easy? There's no reason why it shouldn't be like that.
So I think the solution that we built with Success Services is focused really on the end user.
I felt really comfortable that from a professional services point of view, what good looks like and what success looked like, we instantly had a hit.
And I think that's what sets us apart, especially when that's combined with the skill set and the technology we have in Salesforce, I mean, Salesforce Success Services has all the elements you need to set you up for the future.
For us, this is just the beginning of a journey. We believe we've got the right platform to scale that up.
We have so much functionality to really complete the whole solution for the hospitality industry.
You know, we have global ambitions for this solution and are the ones that will follow it. And we really needed a partner that was going to bring the guarantee that this could be delivered successfully. Working with Salesforce has transformed the way that we will work with our customers.
