CiMSO Hospitality ERP Hackathon 2025: deciding what not to show
How a manager-first analytics dashboard — 25 charts, 45 KPIs, five languages and an LLM assistant — took 1st place out of 11 finalist teams.
At a glance
- CiMSO Hospitality ERP Hackathon 2025
- 1st Place of 11 finalist teams
Competition overview
Teams received access to CiMSO ERP datasets and were challenged to build analytics tools that help hotel managers make faster, better-informed decisions. Finalists were judged on design clarity, business insight and the live presentation.
The challenge
The data was large and varied — bookings, members and guests, arrivals and departures, occupancy and average daily rate, income and more — for a hypothetical hotel franchise in five countries. The hard part was not plotting it all, but choosing what a manager actually needs to see.
Approach
Chart selection, information grouping and interaction flow were treated as the primary design problem. The interface was organised into nine categories with 45 KPIs and time-period filters, so a manager can move between daily, weekly and monthly views without losing context.
Implementation
A Node.js and Express platform with 25 Chart.js visualizations, raw-data tables for record-level checks, colour-blind-friendly palettes and light and dark themes. An LLM-powered assistant generates insights and follow-up questions from the active view, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text in English, Thai, Malay, Traditional Chinese and Burmese.
Results
1st Place out of 11 finalist teams. The dashboard was later selected for a public showcase at the RSU Job Fair 2026.
Lessons learned
Demo text — Owner to write the lessons learned
Deciding early what to leave out made every later design decision easier; the live demo carried more weight with the judges than the feature count.
What I would improve
Demo text — Owner to write what they would change
Usability testing with a hotel manager before the final, and a shorter, scripted path through the demo.