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It helps improve our guest experience .” Wong faced some challenges in making sure that the benefits of digital transformation were understood throughout the organisation . “ It ’ s very hard to show an immediate return on investment with IT systems – it ’ s different from selling rooms ,” says Wong . “ If I sell a room at $ 200 and my cost is $ 100 , my ROI is $ 100 . It takes a long time to realise the value of putting , say , $ 1mn into an IT system .” Wong is clear that such investments do bear fruit , even if their effect is not immediately obvious . It can be the case , however , that some solutions are prohibitively expensive , especially to a company based in Southeast Asia and at the mercy of currency fluctuations . “ When it comes to Malaysia , for example , the cost is four times more than it is in America once you factor in forex rates . This puts some things out of our reach . Based on the challenges that we have dealing with vendors in terms of cost , we have evaluated the cost of hiring developers in Asia , developing a system and getting it up and running and it would still be cheaper than buying from Europe ,” he comments . “ We would love to look into
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