Case Studies

How Silk Hospitality’s internal infrastructure was optimised to promote scalability

Dillon Da Costa
April 17, 2020

Silk Hospitality started from humble beginnings back in the early 1990s and have been rapidly growing ever since. Silk Hospitality provides specialist outsourced housekeeping solutions to the hotel industry across Australia.

As a specialist outsourced housekeeping provider, Silk Hospitality has developed a comprehensive range of integrated services all delivered under one banner. With vast industry knowledge and experience, Silk Hospitality is accomplished at delivering hotels with high-quality housekeeping services with maximum efficiency.

Originally Silk approached Experience Digital with a challenge that many businesses face: “Growing pains” – the idea that as you grow, so must your infrastructure. Silk’s growth was so rapid, it started to negatively impact internal systems, slowing down response times, delaying contracts and managing high volumes of data. With internal systems being a core component of the business structure at Silk, it was important to address the impacts internally in order to continue growing.

''Experience Digital's differentiator is the collaborative and partnership approach they take - it’s why we continue to work with them.''

Founder, Lauren Knee

Our approach

As Silk Hospitality’s business saw increasing growth, they started to accumulate significant tech debt. With undocumented work, the Experience Digital team was tasked with taking over the project and undertaking the expansion of the business capability. A complete audit and system overhaul were required to ensure best-practice in business management, optimising the capability to scale as needed.

Experience Digital’s in-house development team began with a comprehensive code edit and risk profile for the software. Experience Digital discovered that the outdated integration and the insecure frameworks within the platform required an upgrade to operate efficiently. Further to this, the associated risk was significant and needed immediate mitigation.

Silk Hospitality welcomed Experience Digital’s feedback from the research and analysis completed once given access to all internal systems. With this information, the journey was paved and the work began.

Undertaking a collaborative approach, the year-long journey of upgrading the entirety of Silk Hospitality’s system began through an agile process. Furthermore, Experience Digital proposed further models to expand software capability, streamlining operations further.

The outcome

Following the extensive remodelling of their back-end systems, Silk Hospitality‘s strong client base was now supported by an extremely robust, structured system. Capable of low latency, highly scalable operations, Silk Hospitality was ready to plunge into full business growth. As a result, their production increased 30 fold.

The immense growth experienced by Silk Hospitality would not have been possible without the extremely granular and precise analysis undertaken by Experience Digital. The system update provided increased opportunities for qualified lead conversion from website traffic and assisting in maintaining customer relationships efficiently.

Experience Digital maintains a strong relationship with Silk Hospitality, continuing to work together on an ongoing basis to tackle business challenges.