Real – World Cases

Case -1 (10%)
Royal Hotel’s Espresso! Rapid Response Solution

The Royal Hotel in New York City, NY was a luxury all-suite 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 M-Tech’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 onsite training was also offered. The installation and the
training session seemed to run smoothly. Employees appeared eager to learn about

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the new system. However, soon after roll-out the general manager discovered that the
employees had reverted to the old manual system and had rapidly lost interest in
Espresso!

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

➢ 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 – 2 (10%)
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 IT-
driven strategic initiatives, a custom tailored apparel program. By November 2002,
40 per cent of Lands’ End’s web shoppers were buying custom-tailored chinos and
jeans, while 20 per cent 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.
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 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 email to production
facilities in Latin America or Asia. Manufacturers produced, inspected and packed
the garments. The garments were shipped to a third-party shipping center in the US
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
➢ Why did Lands’ End introduce this new information system? What
are the benefits this new system brought to Lands’ End?

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

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 Part – II Discussion Questions (20%)

1. Does your nation have a technology policy? Briefly describe it, providing links to
relevant documents on the Web.
2. Does the government, private enterprise or a combination of the two operate
telephone service? Cellular telephony service? Internet service? Is there competition
in these three areas or is there only a monopoly or oligopoly?
3. How does Internet service in your nation compare with others? For example, what is
the cost of home DSL service compared to other nations? How does the speed
compare? What per cent of average monthly household income is an Internet account
in your nation? Is high speed Internet service (3G, 4G etc) available in every part of
your nation?
4. How long would it take to download a 1 gigabyte copy of a one-hour television show
using a 1 megabit per second DSL link? How long would it take to transmit it across
a 10 gigabit per second backbone link?
5. Telephone and cable TV companies differentiate between telephony, video broadcast
and Internet, charging separately for each service. Water companies could also decide
to enter the service business, differentiating and charging separately for drinking
water, garden water, etc. That sounds kind of goofy doesn’t it? Design a spoof water
bill that makes fun of the idea. What would your water-bill look like if water service
were delivered by your telephone company?

6. Think of an organization that you are familiar with (e.g. a university, a bank). Identify:

a. Two decisions that must be made on a regular basis which are highly
structured, and hence probably could be automated. Are these decisions
currently automated, or performed by humans? If they are not
automated, how challenging would it be to do so? Would it make sense
to create a system (or systems) to automate them? Consider issues such as

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 how many people are currently used to make the decisions, how much
their salaries are, how long it takes them to make decisions, etc.
b. Two decisions that are unstructured, and hence probably should not be
automated. Even if they are not automated, are there ways that an
information system could provide decision-makers with information that
could help them make the decisions? What information would help? Is it
currently available to the decision maker?

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