Antriksh Khurana adds Finance Person of the Year to his achievements

Antriksh Khurana, area financial controller, Shangri-La Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa was on hand to collect his accolade at the 14th Hotelier Awards held at Le Meriden Dubai Hotel & Conference Centre.

Khurana impressed the judges with a custom-made cloud-based HR system that he created for the resort. The project was such a huge success that this model has been adopted by Shangri-La MENA region hotels as best practice.

Commenting on the innovative system, Khurana said: “What we did in the project was we took a democratic approach. We took views from all the stakeholders about what processes needed to be implemented. Simplified the processes, removed paperwork and implemented the system across the resort. It was a team effort.”

Khurana added that there need to be a shift in the way that organisations work with their finance departments: “People need to understand that finance has a much larger role to play than just produce reports at the month end we need to stop doing post mortems and start helping operations to run the business and increase profits for owners and all the stakeholders.”

When asked to pinpoint why he had won, Khurana said: “By profession I’m a qualified accountant but I try to play a business manager role instead of a financial controller role. That helps to think of what is good for the organisation as a whole. I wear a lot of hats.”

Highly commended in the category sponsored by décor partner, Genie Events, was Serge Khairallah finance and business support manager from Crowne Plaza Sohar.

The remaining shortlisted candidates in the category were Meraj Siddiqui, area director for finance & business support, Dar Al Tawhid InterContinental Makkah; Nizar Derbali, financial accountant, TIME Grand Plaza Hotel; Tauseef Arif Abassi, financial accountant, Crowne Plaza Duqm; Vasabha Perera, revenue manager, Dubai International Hotel and Zakaria Siddiqui, director of finance & business support, Raffles Dubai.