Sahara Partners Exclusively With IDS

Vyas Sivanand - Bangalore

Sahara India Pariwar has chosen Bangalore based global software company, IDS Softwares Private Limited (IDS) for all their hospitality related technology solutions. Among the projects undertaken by IDS is the Amby Valley Sahara Lake City, the mega venture of the Sahara group.

Spread across 5,000 acres, the Lake city, which at present has about 400 villas and 20 restaurants apart from a host of other facilities, will be run entirely on the IDS Fortune Enterprise software.

"We are using the latest version 3.3 of Fortune Enterprise at the Lake city. The software will equip the city with facilities like front office management, food and beverage management, store inventory, purchase, engineering maintenance, membership management, finance and accounts, human resource, payrolls, banqueting and conferencing apart from a host of interfaces," said Rajesh P Yadav, general manager - National Sales, IDS Software Pvt Ltd.

The software even enables notification of telephone use, room status, smart card application as well as use of an interactive television wherein one can check bills, activate check-out, order room service, menu display etc. At present the process is still in the implementation stage and will be complete in a month.

"The sheer expanse of the city is what makes the project more challenging. While currently there are 400 villas, the plan is to eventually have close to 4,000 villas. Right now the entire process involves site study, listing our requirements, implementation, training etc, but as and when more villas and facilities are in place, we have to configure them. At this time it is difficult to speculate when the entire Lake city is going to be complete," adds Yadav.

Initially, Sahara had considered Micros Fidelio for the project, but eventually IDS replaced them. "We are focussed only on the hospitality industry and have about 800 hotels in 22 countries using our solutions. We are the only non-American, non-European player in the hospitality technology solutions field in the entire Africa, Middle-East and Asia Pacific region who can be ranked among top two vendors in any of these market," concluded Yadav.