research paper

Case Study – Homestyle Hotels

Introduction

Home style Hotels Inc. with an objective to be the leading hotel chains of America was formed by merging of Lifestyle Resorts and Home Away Hotels a two well established brands. The Initial challenge post-merger is how to integrate the individual hotel operations who had they own style of operating and with not many process that are standardized between the two Hotels. Fred Grains the COO of Home Style had given a mandate to Ben Garrett the IT director to consolidate the firm’s IT so the senior management would have better control over finance, branding, marketing, and operations., After three years of effort ERP system was rollout and the maximum of the required objective was achieved with the implementation of ERP. Now the COO wants a Management information system that gives better information so that the management can better decisions and improve the overall efficiency and customer satisfaction and security at Home style (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

On the other hand, for IT Director Ben, the existing standalone and varied software’s that are used by different hotels with lack of standard definitions between the different processes posed as a huge challenge ahead. The challenges of integration are added with multiple locations geographically, different working cultures and different hardware specifications. Ben along with other business people over the time could overcome hardware issues and standard process issues are taking longer time than expected. So Ben Decided instead of developing internally, get a third party software and make both the hotels use that as a standard (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

Accordingly Ben and his IT team Zero Down two Companies which provide the required and asked business people to join the finalization process. Both HC and CR presented their products to the team taking sample data from a Hotel which follows process which can support the two products .At the end of the presentation there was a disagreement who needs to finalized and as one model helps them to have top management control and other have security and local hotel managers a better and quick information. Now it times to resolves the disagreements and present process and how to take a decision on zero downing the final IT needs for Home Style Hotels (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

Home Style Hotels Inc. –Business Challenges

The Merger of these two hotels is done to create value to the new enterprise Home Style with synergy of the existing strengths .This Merger gives opportunity to aid Home style businesses in numerous ways – the first of it is to diversifying the portfolio, Build on core competencies, establishing new areas of growth platforms, adding a new capacity, reduce cost and many more. But it’s a challenging and time bound task to overcome issues and reach the goals of merger. Home style needs to overcome the below business challenges before attaining the business goals (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Home style need to identify the way the organization functions who will take the decisions in terms of business operation, how home-style works. Whether top down approach or bottom up approach or decentralized approach with appropriate control. All Decisions of business objectives should be taken in line with this policy (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· The Next business challenge is how home style wants to position itself as a brand ,since the individual hotels has a distinct line of business and specific style of operations accordingly ,Home style need to find how it want to be known as a business brand, a resort or a hotel or multi brand business with varied segments (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· The next challenge will be organization human capital, when we look into the current organization structure we haven’t found many business people on top management ,mostly IT people and who have no representation in top management from Life style .How are we at Home Style creating Human capital synergy and leadership pipeline (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Identification of core competencies of each division is not done yet and there is lot of models within how each hotel operates based on its market and operations strengths. Once the core competencies of each hotel and division are identified a broad level Home Style group specific competencies can be build and accordingly the processes can be setup (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· The Long term IT vision has not been developed yet which is a big business decision to take up since it involves lot of investment and can alter how we operate the business and how can take the organization to next level of growth and position us a national Brand .Current short-term, Ad-hoc or judgmental IT investments needs to be dealt with much more long term objectives, process and in line with business objectives (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Creation of Performance standards across the operations in line with both business verticals specific to individual locations, hotel strengths is needed to measure the performance instead going by a same standard for all hotels. This can be done using the past data and analyzing the trends and opportunities (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Home Style need to have centralized Marketing and branding setup since if each individual division has its own marketing and branding setup ,it may conflicts its own other business divisions and can eat into our own customers (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

Home Style Hotels Inc. – Key IT Challenges

Home Style With its greater necessity for investment in IT had great challenges ahead since the merger opened lot of issues to sort out before attaining the goals of IT integration. Home Style must overcome many technology issues since acquisition to unify and streamline business processes across the entire enterprise. Since the two organizations using different systems and applications, particularly when they can have the freedom to use different application to run separate business processes. This different structure makes it crucial for Home style to quickly integrate all the systems, applications and databases in order to get standard business processes up and running. Some of the key challenges faced by Homestyle Hotels are listed below (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· The new Home Style hotel is formed by merger of two hotels which operate in two different verticals of the same hospitality business. The divisions have separate teams to operate them and had strong brand and indigenous style of working. Creating an IT Enterprise that integrates the both the verticals will be biggest challenge (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Creating a Process and steps for identifying various IT requirements that are in line with business objectives of Home Style will be the next big challenges. Currently it done Ad Hoc basics and without a great process or standard model of IT integration (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Creating a Competent IT Steering and IT Decision Making Team will be next key challenge Home Style need to address. The Current Team of COO and IT Director and few Business people won’t be able to look into the small and highly key areas of IT Integrations which only people on the job or daily doing day to day operations can only help. A Holistic Team need to form which can make decisions based on Business needs rather than just what IT can support (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Database creation that can be stored, accessed, update information across the entire organization will be next key challenge. If there is no effective data management solution, retrieval of information scattered across various systems, applications and services is complicated (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· When and where should we start IT Integration? Timing and start point will be key challenge, IT Integration needs a lot of time and manpower from different sections of the business. Creating an appropriate time where everyone can spare time to support the IT integration (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

· Business Processes are pre requisite for integration of systems and process. A Uniform or standard Business process that will be followed across Home style need to first define before start of IT integration. This will be a key challenge since both divisions have different styles and policies (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

Discussion Questions

Does it make good business sense to integrate across the different lines of business represented by Lifestyle Resorts and Home-Away Hotels? What exactly would you integrate (beyond financial information) and why?

A Uniform and centralized information across the verticals and boundaries can give maximum value for any enterprise which has multiple location and styles of operations. That will be an ideal situation where every process and system is uniform, integrated, and scalable and user friendly. Since the Home style operations evolved due to a merger and the first IT implementation started with objective of Management getting control over the marketing and branding operations with unified financial information it created a road blocks before moving to ideal situation (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

The Lifestyle and Home away Hotels over the period has its own style of operations suiting to its different target customers and where mostly successful the way they operated. Any Change in this process to be accepted it need to be something that have great impact on overall performance of the business. IT is not new to any of the divisions but May the latest of IT systems are there with every hotel manager. They all can understand how useful it will be have IT system but still to bring a change it needs a conscious and continuous effort to educate the need for change and the benefits of it. Integration is need across the teams which the high scale of operations at Home style and can bring in lot of efficiency and performance improvement at Home style (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

Customer Information: For a Hotel Business industry Customer information is key source to service him based on his preference and other key characteristics of the customer .A Uniform customer information sheet can bring lot of efficiency into the system. An Integration of this information is highly needed as it creates that uniform standard which helps different hotel managers based on the past history can serve better and improve the performance (Jenkinson, 2006).

Data Integration: Data Base of the entire organization need to be integrated right from customer information, vendor information and marketing data. A centralized data base which have easy and restrictive access to it will form a powerful tool for the entire organization to take quick and cost effective decisions. This helps as a valuable knowledge depository and can be studied to give various trends and opportunities across the business (Ziegler, & Dittrich, 2004).

Performance Information: Integrating the performance information of every hotel and resort across the business will be powerful tool for measuring and improving the performance. This will help top management to take strategic decisions on operations of different hotels and take corrective actions to improve. This gives a standard metric for performance which everyone strives and achieves business goals (Verweire, & Berghe, 2004).

HRM: The human capital information will help to create centralized manpower availability in the system and help in cross sharing of human assets based on the need of different hotels. I will remove redundant employees and create buffer manpower for emergencies. It creates Talent pipeline and uniform employee benefits across the workforce and creates cross learning opportunities to employees and good working culture (Angle, Manz, & Ven, 1985).

Management Information:-A quick and dynamic Management information system which gives information of every operations and process that are related to business is integrated to create a business dashboards and which can be custom used by different people to take not only strategic decisions but also day to day operational decisions. Since the current information is scattered across each hotel this will create a centralized one for top management and can internally create a positive competition among the hotels to strive for performance (Bajgoric, 1997).

Outline a process for Home style to follow in order to decide between the two software options (i.e., HC and CR)? What selection criteria would you use? Who should make the decision?

The Current situation at Home style to finalize software option was taken with absence some pre key activities that need to be finalized before going for IT Integration. The organizational goals and business objectives are be first defined before going on to finalize the software vendors. Based on the organizational goals the Information management system needs will surface and accordingly the software need to integrated which address the needs of the organization (McKeen & Smith, 2012).

The following factors should be taken into consideration before selecting a software.

· All the goals of the organization should be considered and the selection of the software should be made such that its use helps in attaining organizational goals (Lin et al., 2007).

· The software should help the organization in completion of the tasks easily (Lin et al., 2007).

· The stakeholders of the organization should be taken into consideration and their opinion should be included in the selection criteria (Lin et al., 2007).

· The functional requirements of the organization should be considered (Lin et al., 2007).

· The software should be compatible with existing hardware of the organization (Lin et al., 2007).

· The cost of the product should be taken into consideration (Lin et al., 2007).

· The maintenance and support provided process the successful running of the product should be considered (Lin et al., 2007)

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References

Angle, H. L., Manz, C. C., & Van de Ven, A. H. (1985). Integrating human resource management and corporate strategy: A preview of the 3M story. Human resource management, 24(1), 51-68.

Bajgoric, N. (1997). Organizational systems integration: Management information systems perspective. Concurrent Engineering, 5(2), 113-121.

McKeen, J. D. & Smith, H. (2012). IT strategy: Issues and practices. Boston: Prentice Hall

Jenkinson, A. (2006). Do organisations now understand the importance of information in providing excellent customer experience? The Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 13(4), 248-260.

Lin, H., Lai, A., Ullrich, R., Kuca, M., McClelland, K., Shaffer-Gant, J., ... & Watkins, W. (2007, February). Cots software selection process. InCommercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS)-Based Software Systems, 2007. ICCBSS'07. Sixth International IEEE Conference on (pp. 114-122). IEEE.

Ziegler, P., & Dittrich, K. R. (2004, August). Three decades of data integration-All problems solved? In IFIP congress topical sessions (pp. 3-12).