Seven vendors were reviewed by a task force and Eclipse software from Adaco Services LLC was chosen. Loews had installed the Adaco software in its Miami Beach locations on a trial basis five years ago. "We saw food and beverage costs drop one percentage point," Miller-Murphy said. "If you're able to move food costs by a point, everybody in the industry would say, 'How'd you do that?'"

That eventually led to the company-wide rollout that began last year and now includes 60 percent of the chain's hotels. Instead of having to use three- or four-part forms and manual tabulations to order restaurant and bar supplies, workers using the software have cut response and approval times and reduced the amount of manual record-keeping. The company also plans to use the software to manage inventories of dishware, linens and glassware in the next 12 months,.

The system has worked so well that Loews is considering a centralized property management and reservations system, said Tony Del Mastro, CTO for the hotel chain. Property management is now done locally at each hotel, with information later dumped manually into a centralized data repository. The hotel chain's central reservations system is run by Pegasus Solutions Inc. of Dallas, but Loews is now analyzing whether to stay with Pegasus or bring those operations in-house, he said. "From a technical perspective in managing that technology ... it's a lot simpler to run it centrally."

The Eclipse software starts at about $15,000 for a single-property version for five to 10 seats and $30,000 for a multi-property version for the same number of seats, according to Mark Pinsley, CEO of Williamsville, N.Y.-based Adaco. Eclipse competes with traditional ERP packages, he said, but is specialized for hotel and hospitality service operations, he said. The software integrates into point-of-sale systems so inventory and sales are kept up to date.

Robert Goodwin, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said hotel and hospitality businesses have been slow to automate services because they often are owned by local investors who don't want to invest more money. "Sometimes there is a reluctance to spend something until you know it's going to give you a short term turnaround," he said.