Royal Hotel's Espresso! Rapid Response Solution The Royal Hotel in New York City, NY was a luxury allsuite hotel primarily serving an executive clientèle visiting Manhattan on business. These guests were busy and demanding as they used their suite not only as a place to sleep but also as a temporary office. The general manager stressed the importance of the high quality of service due to the high percentage of repeat guests. "Our guests are extremely discerning, it is completely unacceptable to have a light bulb out in the bathroom when the guest checks in, particularly if she is a returning guest," the general manager said.

To ensure the extremely high quality of service, the general manager decided to purchase and install MTech's Espresso! Rapid Response Solution. With this new technology, the housekeepers could report deficiencies directly to the computer, instead of verbally communicated to the maintenance department after they ended of their shift. The housekeepers just needed to dial a special code from the phone in the guest room and an automated attendant would walk them through the reporting process step by step in the language of their choice. Espresso! Then automatically generated, prioritized and dispatches a work order to a printer, fax, or alphanumeric pager. Therefore, the new system should be able to reduce the response time as the housekeepers did not have to wait until the end of the shift to tell the maintenance department, and sometimes they even forgot to tell the maintenance department. Also, Espresso! Had a reporting function so that the management team could obtain information about most frequently occurring or recurring issues, top reporting and completing performers and so on. With this kind of information, the maintenance department could identify recurrent problems and stop them before they even occurred.

Upon installation, a week of on site training was also offered. The installation and the training session seemed to run smoothly. Employees appeared eager to learn about the new system. However, soon after roll-out the GM discovered that the employees had reverted to the old manual system and had rapidly lost interest in Espresso.

Case questions 

5. What are the elements comprising the four components (technology, process, people and structure) of new reporting system? 

6. Why do you think the new reporting system failed? In other words, which of the four components of the information systems failed to support the goal of the system?

Case 

Lands' End's Custom Tailored Apparel Program In October 2001, Lands' End, a direct merchant of traditionally styled clothing who offers products through catalogs and the Internet, announced its new ITdriven strategic initiatives, a custom tailored apparel program. By November 2002, 40% of Lands' End's web shoppers were buying custom-tailored chinos and jeans, while 20% of these shoppers were new customers. 

The concept of this initiative is mass-customization, a process that uses the same production resources to manufacture a variety of similar, yet individually unique products. Experts have found that consumers were willing to pay more for custom apparel and footwear. Other than increasing sales, the custom tailored apparel program brought Lands' End other benefits, including enhancing customer loyalty and lowering the operating costs spent in creating, printing and mailing catalogs. However, withholding catalogs from Internet buyers does not generate online sales. Therefore, sending catalogs at the optimum frequency and pages to keep them apprised of new products is necessary. 

Lands' End's proprietary products, strong distribution infrastructure and established brand made the company ready for this electronic commerce initiative. Also, Lands' End did not set up a separate Internet division; hence, avoided internal competition. To manufacture these individually unique garments, Lends' End partnered with Archetype Solutions, Inc (ASI). After customers entered sizing information on Lands' End website, the orders were sent to ASI and software produced electronic patterns and order files for each order, which were then sent via e-mail to production facilities in Latin America or Asia. Manufacturers produced, inspected and packed the garments. The garments were shipped to a thirdparty shipping center in the U.S. And then shipped to consumers. During the production process, the garments were scanned and the status was updated at each stage of the process. The status report for all orders was sent nightly to Lands' End. ASI contracted with retailers (i.e. Lands' End) and manufacturers. Retailers pay ASI a license fee, which include an annual fixed component based on number of categories and a per unit fee. Therefore, both retailers and ASI had the incentive to sell a lot of units. The manufacturers were also required to license manufacturing and tracking software from ASI. Therefore, the manufacturers need to be able to be adept and flexible, and able to learn new technologies fairly rapidly.

Case questions 

1. Why did Lands' End introduce this new information system? What are the benefits this new system brought to Lands' End? 

2. How can the executives of Lands' End assess the financial and managerial performance impact of this new IT-dependent strategic initiative?