A passionate mathematician, his logic is – “one in 1,000 people are innovative. If you have an organization of 10,000 people, you’re bound to have more innovators than if you have 3 people working in a garage.”

In fact, Dr Ravi, who holds more than one dozen patents, believes the best innovation is yet to come for IDeaS to truly solve the problem of “how do you understand demand as a function of price in a stochastic environment”.

The India-born professor, who was instrumental in leading the company to its acquisition by SAS, says he’s now like a kid in a candy store with full access to resources, “tools that have been tested and perfected over time”, to “build the house that I want”.

And the house he wants to build is an enterprise solution that will crack the pricing problem for hospitality – how what you charge at a restaurant impacts on rooms, and what effect does selling function space have on room revenues, and so on.

“They are all inter-related – spa, ballroom, rooms, restaurants, car park. We want to find the right relationship between all these things that will make a hotel stand out against its competitors in whatever measure it wants – whether it’s profitability or market share.”

To Dr Ravi, revenue management is about increasing profitability while managing risks associated with the uncertain nature of demand. He co-founded IDeaS in 1989 as part of his ambition to develop practical solutions to difficult decision problems.

“Research shows that 40% of executives make decisions based on gut rather than analytics or science.”

And as Google changed search and Facebook social media, he says IDeaS changed the way hotels looked at Bid Rates and opportunity cost. “It didn’t exist before in distribution systems. Our customers, groups like Shangri-La and Hilton, had to force PMS vendors and GDS to build these factors into their system, and now it’s an industry standard.”

Dr Ravi’s first trip to Singapore was in 1995 when the company had just sold its solution to the Shangri-La group and “I had to explain to their general managers how the system would make life better for them”.

Asked if it was hard explaining this, he said, “I am a scientist and my reality is not what we feel but what you can measure. I explained the mathematics of it but at the same time, I also didn’t want them to feel there’s a magician behind the curtain.

“The system by itself cannot work things out, neither can people. Man and machine must work together. What technology can do is draw attention to where the system needs help.”

His return to Singapore almost 20 years later is prompted by IDeaS’ ambition to not only expand in Asia but “embrace Asia”.

“There has to be a way of combining Western technology with the service Asia has to offer. I think we’re no longer in a situation where the East has to learn from the West but what we can teach the West.

“For instance, one-on-one revenue management that’s customized to the needs of the individuals, using a combination of people and technology.”

It will also configure its packages to make them more affordable to hotels at all levels, and it will step up training for customers.

“There was a time when a five star hotel would not think twice of spending $10 million to renovate a ballroom but if you asked them to spend $200,000 on a revenue management system, they’d baulk at the idea ¬– but that is changing in a dramatic way.”

While Dr Ravi agrees that the trend towards last minute bookings and changing customer behaviour may make forecasting more challenging, “we now have tools that we didn’t have before to solve new problems”.

The other big impact on revenue management is social media. “What are people saying about me, who are the influencers – how do you fold that into revenue management?”

Asked if he thinks Facebook would still be around in five years, he said, “Yes, it will grow. It will have more functionality. It may not look like the Facebook of today.”

Given that IDeaS’ first client was Northwest Airlines, Dr Ravi said both airlines and hospitality had much to teach each other. “Hotels have room types while airlines are just starting to understand how to sell different seats. Airlines are good with loyalty programmes and developing customer-specific offers – hotels could learn from that.”

The next thing that needs to be tackled as far as revenue management is concerned is education. “We will invest time and energy on education, perhaps create a system that can self-teach revenue managers. Education of revenue management also has to start in schools.”

And the scientist he admires the most? Isaac Newton. Here’s why. “He’d been working on something for a decade and he had all his papers on the table. Then his dog knocked over a candle, a fire started and everything was burnt. Instead of beating the dog, he merely said to the dog, ‘You do not know the damage you’ve done.’

“He was a true scientist. He didn’t get emotional. The damage had been done, there was nothing he could do about it. He had to solve the problem.”