Digitization of RIU’s supply process in Spain and the Dominican Republic

99 hotels

19 countries

+47.000 hotel rooms

Starting point

After the digitization and automation of B2B invoices emission via baVel, RIU decides to do the same with its supply procedures in Spain in 2012. RIU’s team notices manual, repetitive and tedious tasks that can lead to errors, such as checking delivery notes and invoices thoroughly or accounting more than 18,000 invoices. Managing more than 17,000 orders with more than 60 different suppliers requires new processes. While expanding at a national and global level, RIU needs to automate these procedures so that its team can focus on more valuable tasks. “When we decided to digitize the reception of our invoices we only thought of baVel because the emission of invoices worked really good” explained Juan Piña, Organisation Director at RIU.

While expanding, RIU needs to automate processes so that the team can focus on value-added tasks.

Thanks to baVel’s technology no manual intervention is needed at any stage of the process.

The solution

RIU digitizes its supply chain with orders issuance and reception and reconciliation of invoices through baVel. During the project’s first stage, baVel integrates with Oracle. After the integration, the hotel chain starts to issue orders and receive invoices of all the suppliers in the baVel’s network. For the remaining suppliers, an integration onboarding plan is designed to start gradually the information exchange. Thanks to baVel’s technology, suppliers can generate an invoice based on the delivery note received by RIU to eliminate any discrepancies in the amounts. If the invoice matches the delivery note, baVel reconciles it and integrates it with Oracle. If it doesn’t match, baVel returns it. No manual intervention is needed at any stage of the process. At present, RIU automatically connects with more than a hundred purchase suppliers.

The outcome

In 7 years, RIU has increased by 10% of its transactions (orders, delivery notes, GRN, invoices and validation/rejection) without having to expand its administrative team. It has also added more than 40 suppliers to the automated supply workflow of its 28
hotels in Spain. “baVel has allowed us to increase our suppliers and invoices without making our team larger”, said Piña.

As RIU work with local suppliers, the digitization of the supply chain has to local as well. This is why RIU and baVel are already working to digitize the supply
chain process of all the chain’s hotels in the Dominican Republic. In order to do it, both companies are collaborating from the conception to the development and implementation of the product to adapt to RIU’s needs in the Dominican Republic and all other scenarios where the hotel chain operates.