Consolidated Hospitality Supplies (CHS) is a leading distributor of operating supplies and equipment for the hospitality industry. Comprised of two brands — American Hotel Register and myAMTEX — it currently employs around 150 people. CHS caters to a wide range of hospitality organizations, from small hotels and large resorts to fitness centers and universities.
As CHS CEO Tom Lynch described it: “You walk into a hotel, you go to your room, you open the door — just about everything inside that room we sell to hotels.”
A decade ago, American Hotel Register (AHR) was a billion-dollar enterprise with global expansion plans, which led the company to adopt SAP S/4HANA. As strategic as this investment was for AHR, the system slowly began to transform into a heavily customized, complex, and expensive resource.
“What happened was AHR took the best of SAP, then added the best of everything else,” explained Soumyo Mukherjee, director of IT at CHS.
While not necessarily the most efficient strategy, it worked well enough for AHR — until COVID-19.
The pandemic forced virtually all hospitality facilities to close, leaving AHR with millions in inventory and shrinking its revenue to under $200 million. In 2021, CHS acquired the American Hotel Brand and its IT assets.
Among other things, this necessitated a reduction in IT spending, all the while needing to stay resilient and ready to ramp operations back up in a post-pandemic world.
Forced into action, CHS began looking for a new approach, and found it with SAP and partner ASAR Digital.
Turning point for CHS and SAP
That approach was to adopt SAP Cloud ERP.
At the very least, moving to SAP Cloud ERP would help CHS greatly streamline its IT landscape, eliminate complex customizations, simplify processes, and enable the organization to embrace the latest SAP innovations.
The pandemic highlighted the need for CHS to modernize its operations, maintain cost-efficiency, and position the company for future growth, which served as additional reasons for selecting SAP Cloud ERP.
“The cloud and innovative AI solutions could simplify business complexity and lower costs with the least amount of technology-heavy lifting for CHS associates,” noted Mukherjee.
CHS is now in the process of implementing SAP Cloud ERP, planning to go live late in 2025.
“Moving to a clean core will help CHS not only reduce costs and IT burdens, but also lay a strong foundation for leveraging next-generation AI and digital capabilities,” said Sanjjeev Singh, president and CEO of ASAR Digital. “Our partnership is all about turning challenges into opportunities for innovation and sustainable growth.”
AI use cases and innovation
CHS is also excited about the future of AI and latest SAP innovations, particularly around SAP Business AI. According to Mukherjee, “We are definitely looking to utilize as much AI capabilities as we can. In order to do that, we are trying to stick with the best practices of SAP, which is keeping the clean core principle, so that as AI evolves, as Joule evolves, we can make full use of that.”
Lynch further explained how CHS might be able to benefit from AI, saying, “Whether it relates to pricing, inventory management, timing of transportation — there are so many things that we could potentially benefit from. There’s tremendous opportunity to use our own data to be more powerful.”
By shedding complexity and embracing a clean core philosophy with SAP Cloud ERP, CHS is not just recovering; it is strategically rebuilding for a future that is leaner, smarter, and powered by innovation.
Eric van Rossum is CPO of Industries and Globalization and chief marketing officer for SAP Business Suite at SAP.
