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September 27, 1999

InformationWeek500
A Trip To Grandma's Goes High Tech

Hospitality and Travel

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Hospitality and Travel

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Customer service and apple pie? It's all part of what IT brings to the table.

By Beth Bacheldor

ot apple pie with creamy vanilla ice cream. Lemonade just like Grandma's. Meat loaf, chicken pot pie, and other treats that take us back to simpler times. That's what Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. is all about. But while the food is old-fashioned, the IT that keeps the company's 400 stores humming is anything but.

The same goes for many of the InformationWeek 500 companies in the hospitality and travel-services sector, which includes some of the nation's largest restaurant and hotel chains. They're turning to IT initiatives such as data warehouses, object-oriented middleware, slick new graphical user interfaces, computer-based training systems, and the Internet to improve customer service, refine operations, and turn a profit.

Cracker Barrel, which last year opened 50 new locations and drove net sales to $1.3 billion, is using IT to help train some 50,000 employees, most of whom work directly with customers in the restaurants, gift shops, and service stations the company operates in 40 states across the country. The strategy is two-fold: A better-trained staff means better customer service and lower turnover in an industry where employees come and go with great frequency.

"We're trying to maximize training dollars, which is especially important with the low unemployment rate," says Mike Matheny, CIO at Cracker Barrel, in Lebanon, Tenn. "It's really difficult to find people who want to stay and work in the services industry."

Matheny and his team of about 125 IT professionals are looking to computer-based training systems and the Web to train employees in areas such as food handling, customer service, and store policies. As part of a pilot program, the restaurateur is using Microsoft NT systems running computer-based training software that supports full audio and video. Cracker Barrel has already put together 45 courses and is offering them to about 10% of its stores. Employees are also able to access personnel information from Cracker Barrel's human-resources division. By this fall, all stores will have access to the training.

"Traditionally in this industry, workers are given a manual to take home and study, then they come back in and take a test," says Matheny. "The new online training program is self-paced, and the feedback we've gotten already has been positive." Employees access on-the-spot training at the stores where they work. The training program also includes tests to measure comprehension at various points throughout a course, Matheny says.

Of course, the new training initiative should also keep customers happy. "Workers are empowered with more information, and if there's a problem with a customer, solutions can be found much more quickly," says Matheny.

Leveraging IT
Like Cracker Barrel, other companies in the hospitality and travel-services sector recognize the importance of IT. In a business where service is as important-if not more so-than the products being sold, understanding and meeting customer demands is crucial.

"The business issues have been pretty similar for a number of years, but things are coming to a head now in the hospitality industry," says Barry Shuler, senior VP of strategy and planning at Marriott International Corp.'s information-resources department. "We want to know what our customers desire so we can position our services," he says. "We need to have customer information available in real time that's current and accessible at any point where we touch the customer."

To that end, Marriott will spend the next three to five years overhauling all its applications, including its property-management and central-reservations systems, with object-oriented application integration tools from Fort� Software Inc. The company is also building an enterprise data warehouse, with financial and reservations data marts that hold historical data. The reason: Marriott wants to be a data-driven company. As such, it's moving back to host-based computing so it can serve up customer and operational data from a centralized point to any system, be it a PC running a browser, a handheld device, or a call center.

One of the goals of Marriott's IT initiative is to eliminate multiple versions of the same customer profile. Instead of each hotel maintaining customer information in systems on their premises, the data will be centrally maintained. "This is the evolution from a highly fragmented set of systems to a more enterprise class of systems," Shuler says. With centralized data, for instance, a customer could call a nationwide, toll-free number and request a specific room at one of the more than 1,900 Marriott hotels around the world. "Today, if you want to know if a specific room is available, you can't know without calling the specific hotel," Shuler says.

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