Most hospitality companies today have grown-tremendously-through a mix of acquisitions and building out individual properties. With that growth has come a problem: property-specific processes and operating models, along with archaic, incompatible software systems.

These ancient systems-covering everything from human resources and finance to supply chain oversight and customer experience analytics-often can't talk to each other. That can make sharing data and services across functions and properties challenging. It can make finance labor-intensive. It can slow down the integration of acquisitions and the realization of synergies.

But some leading hospitality companies are overcoming these problems, thanks to cloud-based tools. These tools are automating more and more of finance, human resources, procurement and supply chain oversight. In these companies, shared services-and shared data analytics, on customers and business processes alike-are growing rapidly.