Ecobillz: Spearheading A New Age change to Digitally Drive Hospitality Industry in India
Established in 2016, Ecobillz is an innovative SaaS based real time digitization platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize, collect, aggregate data and build complex back-office automation systems. The product, connects with the existing systems and software, accessing the data and streamlining them onto Ecobillz platform to ease the document management process in large organizations. Dr. Ameet Patil, Founder & CEO of Ecobillz Private Limited, share more insights on the same
-Can you briefly explain what Ecobillz is and how does it work?
Ecobillz is an AI-led digitization and automation SaaS platform offering comprehensive modules such as digital check-in/check-out, Account Receivables (AR), Income Audits, E-Invoicing, C-form automation, etc.
The best part about Ecobillz is that it requires no change in existing software or process in the organization. Hotels therefore can quickly adopt Ecobillz without making any change to their existing systems and processes. Ecobillz does not require tight integration with any software. It uses AI to read what gets printed from property management software (PMS) or Point of Sale (POS) and seamlessly digitizes the documents. On top of this, using the data thus collected it is able to perform multiple levels of automation easing time and effort in complex processes such as AR and reconciliation which earlier used to take up weeks if not months of effort.
-Impact of digitalisation on the hospitality industry?
By adopting digitization, hotels are now able to get rid of paper and the storage related problems. Earlier paper based invoices were filed and stored for over 6 years in a secure storage space due to govt. compliance. With digitization, all digital documents are safely and securely stored on cloud or data centre where that can be quickly searched and accessed in real-time.
Using deep digitization techniques not only documents get digitized, the data in those documents get accumulated, categorised and analysed. Guest consumption patterns, profiling, preferences are some of critical use cases for enhancing guest experience. Automated reconciliation, collation of stay and Food & beverage invoices to bundle them together for use in AR and conduct fully automated income audits to identify anomalies/discrepancies are phenomenal use cases for the hotel’s back office or finance.
The impact is tremendous:
- Save costs in paper usage and storage
- Saving manual effort and time to perform mundane tasks
- To get a complete bird’s eye view of the organization across multiple hotels in real-time
-Why is digitalisation the need of hour in industries?
Previously the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for digitization was huge because the hotel had to spend huge amounts on infrastructure to create their own round the clock data centre, setup a team to maintain hi-tech servers round the clock, etc.
Firstly, with cloud based solutions becoming mainstream, the TCO is vastly reduced, the hotel need not worry about setting up and maintaining their own data centre. They can go on pay as you go and pay per use model and get all the benefits of digitization.
Secondly, COVID has shown that businesses should now be ready to be operable from anywhere remotely. Digitization helps with remote access making remote work seamless and secure.
-What are your future plans for Ecobillz in coming years?
Ecobillz recently won the Elevate 2021 start-up competition in Karnataka making it one of the top start-ups in Karnataka state. With its current wide spread usage in the premium hospitality chains in India, Ecobillz aims to become a household name in the hospitality in industry world over. Ecobillz plans to rapidly expand into overseas markets such as Africa, middle-east, Europe and south-east Asia.
