Delphi, or Garbage In, Garbage Out

Before Delphi, I wrote the ballroom out by hand in a big book.

That is the whole explanation of what changed. Ballroom A for the general session, Ballroom B for lunch, C and D held as breakouts, all of it in my handwriting in a ledger that lived on someone's desk and could not be in two places at once. The banquet event orders, the documents the operations staff actually runs your event from, with every menu and every setup and every time on them, got written out longhand and handed to a secretary to type. Then you checked her typing. Then you checked your own math on the banquet check, because nothing added itself.

Delphi came along and did all of that from one screen. You block the space in the system, you type the menus in, and it spits out the BEO with the details attached and the banquet check built from whatever charges you entered, meals, audiovisual, a power drop, the works. Contracts come out of it. Every note, every activity, every phone call you had with a client at four in the afternoon lives in there. For most of my career, at nearly every hotel I worked at, Delphi was the booking system and the institutional memory and the paperwork factory all at once. Marriott has recently gone off and built their own thing, which I am sure is lovely.

It is a genuinely amazing system, provided every piece of information in it is correct. Human beings being what they are, this is not a daily occurrence. We had a saying for that, and it was garbage in, garbage out.

The trouble is that Delphi is helpful. It has auto prompts, which means that if you fail to tell it something, it will confidently make an assumption on your behalf and print that assumption on a report your director reads. Put in a hosted bar for two thousand dollars at a party for four hundred people, and if you are not careful about entering it as one bar at two thousand, Delphi will grab that guest count and give you four hundred bars at two thousand dollars each. Your forecast now shows eight hundred thousand dollars of liquor. Nobody drinks like that. Not even the bar mitzvah crowd.

It does the same thing in the other direction, quietly, which is worse. Enter a breakfast for two hundred and Delphi assigns the average base breakfast price, call it thirty-nine dollars a head. If that breakfast is actually an elaborate brunch with a bar and a carving station and everything else that makes revenue interesting, your real number is closer to a hundred a head, and the forecast is going to be wrong by a lot in the direction nobody complains about until later. Go the other way and it hurts. You book a nonprofit dinner for three hundred at forty dollars because it is a need date and you want the business. Delphi puts sixty-five on it because sixty-five is the average. Your director builds a forecast showing roughly double what that check is ever going to be, and then at the end of the month somebody wants to know what happened. What happened is that nobody typed in the discount.

So the forecast reports went out weekly, because that is how it works almost everywhere. Three months of business at a time, every manager getting the list of everything upcoming, marked prospect, tentative or definite. Prospects you handicap out loud: twenty-five percent chance, probably not, watch this one. Tentatives sit at ninety-five to a hundred, because tentative means the contract has gone out and you are waiting on it to come back. The definites are where you earn your keep, because a definite showing fifty thousand dollars that you know is going to actualize at twenty-five thousand is a problem you have to raise yourself, in a meeting, in front of people. Then you do it again the next week.

There is also a thing we call turning an event, which just means moving it from one status to the next. Prospect to tentative when the contract goes out. Tentative to definite when it comes back with a deposit. I always turned my contracts at the food and beverage minimum, even when I was fairly sure the event would land higher. A wedding booked a year out has a minimum of forty thousand plus tax and service charge and absolutely no other decisions made, so forty thousand is the honest number. Then you detail it for twelve months and it comes in at fifty, and that extra ten is slippage, and slippage is a lovely word.

Lovely because sales and catering managers carry revenue goals. I turn that contract in January and I get credit for forty thousand dollars in January. The wedding happens the following March, comes in at fifty, and that March I get the ten thousand. You are, in a modest way, being paid twice for being conservative in the winter. I have never known a catering manager who forgot this.

Where it really goes sideways is when nobody puts the detail in at all. A four-day conference belongs to the group sales manager, and it is that person's job to enter Monday general session as one item, seven breakouts as seven items, lunch, reception, dinner, each with times and guest counts and setups. What you frequently get instead is Ballroom One, eight in the morning to eight at night. Ballroom Two, eight to eight. Ballroom Three, eight to eight, and onward, with no program, no agenda and no indication of what is supposed to happen inside any of it. The catering or conference services manager opens that file and has essentially been handed a hostage situation. The only practical fix is to wipe out everything the other manager entered and rebuild the whole thing from scratch, correctly, which takes days, and which you do while being perfectly pleasant to that person in the hallway.

Sometimes it is smaller and just as expensive. Somebody enters a one-day event as running Sunday through the following Friday, and for six months nobody can book that space because the system says it is gone.

And then there is the one I have never fully gotten over. I was director of catering, and one of my managers booked the grand ballroom for a large bar mitzvah. Contract out, deposit in, everything moving. She then booked the same ballroom on the same day for a large fundraiser. Contract out, event orders out. Two clients, two signed contracts, one room, one night. What she did internally was turn the ballroom on the air wall. Grand A for the bar mitzvah, Grand B for the fundraiser.

Both groups arrived, as groups do. Neither event fit in half a ballroom, and both clients understood this immediately and at volume.

The system did not do that. The system did exactly what it was told. It held the space, it printed the orders, it built two banquet checks and it filed everything under the correct dates, which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

I still think about the big book sometimes. You could not turn a ballroom into two ballrooms in a book without seeing your own handwriting do it.