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Marriott International uses Oracle PeopleSoft Solution
Marriott International
Business Challenge
The Information Resources group at Marriott International needed to improve the
efficiency and effectiveness of its IT projects and resources to help offset the
economic impact of the slowdown in business and leisure travel. Specifically,
management wanted to standardize on a single solution to automate the time
tracking and project accounting processes, and improve visibility into resource
utilization and project costing.
PeopleSoft Solution
With PeopleSoft Enterprise Service Automation from Oracle, Marriott
International now has a single view of project and resource costs and
performance across its organization. The ability to monitor key metrics like
resource utilization, resource allocation, and project performance in real time
helps Marriott International maximize IT project investments and better leverage
technology to transform its lodging operations.
“For Marriott International, speed to market is key. With PeopleSoft
Enterprise Service Automation, we now get metrics in real time on costs,
resource utilization, resource allocation, and project performance. We have that
all bundled together in an instant view, giving us the agility to react very
quickly.”
Howard Melnick Senior Vice President, Application Services
Hilton Hotels Corporation uses Oracle PeopleSoft Solution
Hilton Hotels Corporation
Business Challenge
The 1999 acquisition of Promus Hotel Corporation and a scramble to address
Y2K left the Hilton Hotels Corporation with a fragmented enterprise
infrastructure that consisted of too many servers, operating systems, and
databases. The company decided to undertake the dual challenge of upgrading the
entire organization to Oracle’s PeopleSoft 8 and migrating operations onto a new
server platform and database.
PeopleSoft Solution
Because of Hilton’s relatively lean IT staff, PeopleSoft Global Services
crafted a program of on-site consulting, strategic planning, and Solution
Center-based implementation to assist the company with the upgrade and migration
projects. This three-prong approach enabled Hilton to complete its rollover to
PeopleSoft 8, as well as the new Dell servers with SQL Server database, faster
and more efficiently.
“Hilton is the ultimate real-time environment. We don’t do batch payrolls
every Thursday night. If Hotel A wants to run its payroll Monday at 11 p.m.,
they do it.”
Damien Bean Vice President, Corporate Systems
NH Hotels Consolidate with Oracle Collaboration Suite
NH Hotels Consolidate with Oracle Collaboration Suite
Adding Value to Hotel Loyalty Programs for both Guest and Hotel. (2006), Adding Value to Hotel Loyalty Programs for both Guest and Hotel, Göteborg, Graduate Business School Full text available as: AbstractLoyalty programs are widely used in the tourism and hospitality industry, indeed instances where airlines, hire-car agencies and hotels are not part of a program are rare. Loyalty Programs not only encourage and reward customer loyalty but allow a company to learn specific details about an individual’s patterns and behaviour. However while these programs are widely utilised little has been written about them in tourism and hospitality marketing literature. This study has three purposes, to analysis the Scandinavian hotel loyalty program marketplace, to analysis member/non-member behaviour and attitudes and to draw conclusions as to what will make loyalty programs more valuable to both the member and hotel. Empirical data was collected from international hotel chains within Scandinavia, from members of the RicaCard loyalty program and from a survey of the general population of Gothenburg, Sweden. The main results indicated that little differentiation existed in terms of design and to a lesser extent range of rewards within the marketplace and that guests where often members of several programs. The conclusions suggested that by giving members more opportunity to invest in a program, especially early on they may become more committed to one program and therefore become loyal to a hotel chain. AuthorsGillies, Luke Kitamura, Tomoko Yokota-Landou, Maki
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Information Technology in the Hospitality Industry Peter O'Connor, Ph.D.
O'Connor_Murphy_ijhm2005 [PDF-37K]
Mar 2006
...on Information Technology in the Hospitality Industry Peter
O'Connor, Ph.D. (Corresponding...on information technology in the hospitality
industry. The analysis revealed three broad...aftermath of the dot com
boom, the hospitality industry is realising that information
technology...
Retain your customers
Mårtensson, Ann / Sandberg, Per / Scharmer, Carl, Jan 2005
...6 2.3 Customer relationship
management.......................................................7 2.3.1 The
function of CRM...............................................................................8
2.4 Business relations...
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| Author: | Mårtensson, Ann ; Sandberg, Per ; Scharmer, Carl | ||||||
| Title: | Retain your customers | ||||||
| Department: | Jönköping University, Jönköping International Business School, JIBS, Business Administration | ||||||
| URI: | urn:nbn:se:hj:diva-97 | ||||||
| Publication type: | Undergraduate thesis C-level 10 p. | ||||||
| Language: | English [en] with a summary in English [en] | ||||||
| Keywords: | Bachelor thesis within Business Administration | ||||||
| Abstract [en] : | Customer relations are of great concern for companies,
even more today than before since the business environment is more
competitive due to the increasing number of actors in the market.
Regarding service firms, the relations are of even greater importance
due to that services are more complex than products and also more
correlated to the actual firm than a physical product. Firms within this
business therefore have to concentrate even more on their customer
relations. With this in mind, strategies about customer relations are
discussed in this thesis as well as customers’ needs, satisfaction and
loyalty. If a company does not fulfill the customer’s needs and
expectations it will be difficult to get satisfied and loyal customers.
It can be the small details that can make the difference between a
satisfied and a dissatisfied customer. This can be; listen to the
customers, observe them and try to find similarities between the
customers, their businesses and the consultants business, to find
synergies between these. In addition, to help the customers to develop
and change, let them give feedback and complain, so the company can
identify how the company performs. This will hopefully end up in loyal
and satisfied customers. To see how a company manages its customer relations, interviews with a specific company and its customers will be conducted. The company’s view will thereafter be compared with their customers’ view as well as the theory, to try to find similarities and differences between them. Conclusions are drawn from aspects where the company and its customers have unlike opinions as well as where the opinions are similar. It can also be concluded that the chosen company’s customer relations and how these are retained differs from the theory in some approaches. |
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| Year: | 2005 | ||||||
| Available: | 2005-06-15 | ||||||
| Pages: | 76 | ||||||
| File: | urn_nbn_se_hj_diva-97-1__fulltext.pdf (application/pdf) | ||||||
| File size: | 515088 bytes | ||||||
| Checksum: | 26f1890ac0800c398eb7c00c72c897a6 (MD5) | ||||||
A Hyperion Customer Success Story
Global Hyatt Corporation
Hyatt (English) (PDF) Our Server
Executive Summary
| The goal |
Put your hotel
at their fingertips
| The advantage |
Real world
experience
| The benefits |
Improve the
guest experience while reducing costs
Business Summary
| The goal |
Offer more
choices, more convenience, more control
| The advantage |
IBM is a
self-service pioneer
| The benefits |
Check in, check
out without reservation
| The approach |
IBM helps Hilton
exceed expectations
| The financial advantage |
Self-service can
pay off
Technical
Details
| The issues |
Upgrade your
hospitality offerings
| The benchmark |
Check out IBM
without reservation
| The components |
The technology
behind self-service
pSeriesv systems—UNIX®- (IBM AIX®) and Linux™-based servers combined with
the POWER4™ technology and autonomic computing features.
xSeries® systems—include integrated IBM ServeRAID™ 7e as a standard feature,
providing new levels of data protection at no additional cost.
| The implementation |
Fairmont checks
in with kiosks
| The cost of ownership |
Control costs
through the entire IT lifecycle.
| Next steps |
| Hospitality technology architecture (98KB) |
Room With a View
by Larry Mundy
by Larry Mundy |
| August 2006 |
Different Views of Customer Service
.
The Airline “Passenger Experience” vs
the Hotel "Guest Experience"
One thing you can say about hotels, they don’t tend to move around very much, even if they have serious foundation problems.
Airplanes, on the other hand, tend to be moving all the time because they cost a gajillion dollars and make no money unless they’re going somewhere. I like hotels a lot better, because they rarely crash into mountainsides. But for all their differences, the hotel business and the airline business are inextricably intertwined. If the planes don’t fly, the guests don’t arrive. And if there aren’t any hotels in a given city, people tend not to fly there.
So it’s always been curious to me that these two industries have such different views of customer service. We even call them different things: our welcomed “guest” is the airlines’ nameless “passenger.” Let’s track a typical customer through a flight, and a hotel stay.
Let’s say the customer lives in Miami, and he wants to go to Kansas City for a couple days to see his beloved parents. He will find that there are hotels of all types and prices in Kansas City, which will welcome him whether he shows up at noon, or at 2 AM. But there are only three flights which will take him there, all of which require that he leave for the airport before sunup, or at rush hour.
He calls for a reservation. The hotel will ask whether he wants smoking or non-smoking, king or double-double, pool view or highway view, and so on. The airline will merely inquire whether he wants to spend $500 more for a seat up front which may actually be wider than he is. The seats in the back were engineered by Mattel for the Barbie and Ken Dream Home of 1959.
He must arrive at the airport two hours early and stand in a long line of people who have removed their shoes, jewelry, and pocket change to shuffle though a portal made from a highly modified microwave oven, where his entire skeleton is exposed onscreen to a grumpy federal employee. At the hotel, he will be cheerfully welcomed and no one will ask him to disrobe in the lobby or demonstrate the functionality of his laptop.
While waiting for his flight, he will sit in a dirty plastic chair and listen to flight-cancellation announcements in three languages. While waiting in the hotel lobby, he will sink into a plush couch and listen to soothing background music.
Going to his hotel room, he will walk through a well-appointed lobby to the elevator, and he will have the option to have any large luggage delivered to his room. Going to his seat on the plane, he will drag his luggage down a narrow aisle, bench-press it above his head, and try to fit it into a plastic glove compartment (of course, he did have the option to have his larger luggage mistakenly delivered to Copenhagen for three days).
Arriving at his hotel room, he finds a secure door leading to his private space. Arriving at his airplane seat, he finds himself wedged between the obesity clinic poster child and a mother holding a fragrant, crying infant.
His private hotel bathroom is tastefully decorated, sparkling clean, and has a neat arrangement of soaps, towels and potions. The plane’s bathroom is the size of a breadbox, with transparent paper towels and an assortment of warning stickers. In this tiny environment, the mere flushing of the toilet would suck his eardrums out of his head, except he is only free to go there when the seat belt light is not on (which is, of course, when everyone else is trying to go there too).
If he is hungry, the hotel will bring him anything on the room-service menu. The plane’s flight attendant will bring him a a two-inch-square bag of impenetrable foil, containing 1.7 broken pretzels. If he is thirsty, the hotel has a huge array of liquid concoctions in chilled glasses, which can be charged to his room. The flight attendant has three different soft drinks, and/or two liquors in bottles smaller than the hotel shampoo, handed to him in a small plastic cup just as the flight experiences severe turbulence. These must be paid for in cash, immediately, even though the flight attendant won’t have change until they’re somewhere over St. Louis.
In the hotel, the large-screen TV has an assortment of premium and free-to-guest channels, pay movies, and video games. On the plane, a 5-inch TV 3 aisles away plays yesterday’s news program interspersed with ads for the airline. The hotel has a huge bed and comfy chair. The plane has a seat in front of him, right where his knees want to be. The hotel has a working desk with convenient lighting and outlets. The plane has a fold-down tray that causes a crease at belly-button latitude when the guy in front reclines his seat into your chin.
When the hotel stay is over, the guest checks out at his leisure. When the flight is over, the passenger reenacts the Bataan Death March, waiting for everyone in front of him to tug their luggage out of the glove compartments and shuffle up the gangplank.
But to me, this is the most incredible part: the flight usually costs more than the hotel! And the hotel business is currently on the upswing, with rising RevPAR and profitability in most markets, while airlines are going bankrupt on a regular basis. Could this have anything to do with the customer experience?
| Also See: | The Hotel Guest With Half a Brain / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 |
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The Latest Thing - Fractional Ownership Of Things or FOOT Financing for Hotels / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 |
| Hotel Floor Surfaces - Hard or Soft? / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 | |
| Hotel Bathroom Origami - That Tiny Detail of Carefully Triangulated Toilet Paper / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 | |
| A Chain, a System, a Franchise, a Collection, a Group, a Brand... / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 | |
| The Forensic Hotel Housekeeper / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / July 2006 | |
| The Exercise Room in Your Hotel - Sweating the Details / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / June 2006 | |
| Remembering the old-time Hotel Engineering Department / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / June 2006 | |
| Curse of the Hotel Lobby-Dwellers / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / June 2006 | |
| What Do You Do With an Old Hotel? / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / June 2006 | |
| Hotel Smokers: A Dying Breed / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| The New Food & Beverage – Food “Just Like Home” / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| Guest Privacy – It’s Not Just a Door Tag Anymore / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| The Future of Hotel Reservations / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| Soon Every Town in America Will Have an Unused Convention Center / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| Hotel Pool Safety 101 / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| Where Not To Build a Hotel / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / May 2006 | |
| “Exterior Corridors” – Disappearing, Because They Never Existed / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy | |
| My Top Ten Worst Hotel Inventions / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / April 2006 | |
| Bed Tech / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / April 2006 | |
| A Sense of Arrival / Room With a View - a Column by Larry Mundy / April 2006 |
“A Bakers Dozen” of Strategies for Hotel Directors of Housekeeping / Dr. John Hogan
“A Bakers Dozen” of Strategies for Hotel Directors of Housekeeping / Dr. John Hogan
Previous months
Hotel Sales & Marketing Professionals
Taming the Beast…What Hotel Managers Need to Know To Reduce Turnover
Dale Carnegie once said “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion”. How often have you had a problem with an associate and tried to deal with it in a good logical business manner; only to make matters worse? Maybe using logic, instead of appealing to emotion, is part of the problem.
Turn-over has been the scourge of our industry for a very long time. The cost, in terms of both productivity and money, is huge; a problem which almost every hotel shares. I don’t propose to know all the answers to this complex problem, but allow me to offer an additional paradigm to consider.
In the last fifteen years or so, it seems that our industry has taken a more clinical and logical approach to hiring and dealing day-to-day with associates. Years ago, the process was a far more simple one; perhaps too simple, but have we now eliminated the emotion, gut-feel, and our own impulses from dealing with associates?
We now have “screening” by human resource experts, and “warnings”, both oral and written, to discipline associates; yet very few reward programs. Are we relying on clinical processes just a little too much? When did we stop relying on the hotel manager’s experience and gut-feel?
The Hiring Process
It all starts with the hiring process. In the 80’s, human resource experts outside our industry told us that employment testing aides would solve our turnover problem forever; hence the birth of one such system, the P.I. (Predictive Index). Human resource experts told us that it was simply a matter of hiring the “right” people.
The P.I. seemed to be a fairly simple straight-forward process; it was a matter of matching the personality traits of job candidates with those of successful associates already on staff and doing well in their jobs. This was to be one of many new clinical approaches to solving an ongoing problem.
The principle was to take some of the subjective decision-making out of the hiring process. We were told that we were simply hiring the wrong people; problem solved, right? Well, not quite.
I hate to speculate how many potentially good people were eliminated by various forms of testing. Perhaps the best interview method I have seen was one which used the department head to conduct the initial interview; after-all isn’t this the most important relationship? The department head then presents the candidate to some of the people in that department to discuss the job, the second most important relationship; then, finally to the general manager and human resources for final approval.
This system gets more people involved and gives each and every one of them a vested interest in the new person’s success; a good support system. But, this is only one part of the problem.
Keeping Good People Motivated
Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, said that trust is the highest form of motivation. Why is it that new associates usually start a job with vim and vigor, ready to conquer the challenges of their new job, yet fizzle within a few months or less? Lack of trust is often the demon.
There are many possible reasons for management turn-over and it usually results from a combination of several contributing ills, however, the most common cause of turn-over is a lack of trust and a fixation on the need to micromanage people. In the 90’s, we referred to the fix as “empowerment”; but empowerment requires trust.
Micro-managers beware; obvious lack of trust will destroy self-motivation and create insecurity in even the best of associates. Micromanagers generally have one thing in common; they only trust their own decisions, their own procedures, and constantly feel “If I want it done right, I need to tell them how to do it”. The thing which makes them feel this way is a complete distrust of their associates’ ability to accomplish tasks assigned to them.
It’s ironic that most micromanagers have never even performed the jobs they prefer to micromanage. They are simply fixed on maintaining control.
Arrogance, as opposed to confidence, is common with micromanagers and contributes to and supports their feelings that only they know how to get the job done. Hotels, led by micromanagers, never experience the wonderful results possible when innovation and trust is a part of the hotel’s culture.
Micromanagers are constantly seeking people who will only do as they are told. For micromanagers, directing job tasks is easier than clearly defining goals, providing guidelines, supplying resources, and then giving managers and their subordinates the freedom to create their own methods to achieve those goals.
Now I know that there may be some micromanagers shaking their heads as they read this article. Micromanagers rarely recognize this trait in themselves. Hands-on micromanagers rarely ask questions; they prefer to dictate tasks. They are generally obsessed with reading reports yet rarely accept the veracity of the reports they read. They get involved in the details of performing specific tasks instead of providing leadership and guidance.
Trust is a powerful quality. Develop trust for the competency of your associates. Provide them with a clear picture of the goal, guidance sources, access to additional resources, and a good benchmarking system to measure effectiveness; but leave the methods to them. It may take a little more time to set up “Stewardships” with your managers and associates, but you will be rewarded with a happier, more loyal, and more productive team.
| Contact:
Neil Salerno, CHME, CHA |
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| Also See: |
Effective Hotel People Thrive on Change; Remember the IBM Selectric Typewriter? / Neil Salerno / July 2006 |
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The Best Hotel General Manager I Ever Met / Neil Salerno / October 2005 |
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