Carlson When Hospitalitywhich franchises, owns, and manages hotels such as Country Inns & Suites, Radisson, and Regent considered getting rid of its binder-size monthly status reports and replacing them with sleek handhelds that would deliver real-time information about occupancy, VIP visits, and overbooking, the company knew the project wouldn't be a walk in the park. Any system that the company built would eventually have to work at 750 hotels in 55 countries and accommodate more than 2,000 users. For many global corporations, the very thought of offering so many far-flung people access to so much information would place the project on the chopping block, ready to be scaled down, but Carlson scaled up. During the last three years, the Minneapolis-based company spent $21 million re- architecting its core systems and integrating data from at least six databases. And while that restructuring was not done with a vast wireless project in mind, the resulting order made it possible for the technology team to push the hospitality company's key indicators out over a wireless local area network (LAN), as well as a wired network. The integration was vital to the wireless project because it organized the data (occupancy rates, pricing information, and so on) from all the company's different databases in ways that will someday make worldwide distribution feasible. "That new architecture was a prerequisite to having the data available to work with, says CIO Scott Heintzeman. But it tied managers to their desks because that information could only be accessed from PCs. Carlson wanted to "[get] managers out from behind their desks and talking to the customers," Heintzeman said. "We're not just pushing out static information, [but] information in a graphical format that makes it easy [for managers] to spot trends." For example, a room-booking screen managers lets view day-by-day or year-by-year occupancy rates. To achieve this goal Heintzeman and his team had to build an application that would make sense of the information as it was presented on handheld computers. And, of course, Carlson had to set up wireless LANs in each hotel where the wireless system would be used. Heintzeman and his team chose to implement the new system on Pocket PCs from Compaq Computer Corp. rather than on the Palm Pilot or similar handheld computers because it was easier to develop software on PocketPCs Microsoft operating system than on the Palm Pilot's operating system. In March 2001, the company began a trial of the new system in a Minneapolis hotel and quickly expanded the test to four other locations. Managers in those hotels use their desktop computers to select the pieces of data, such as occupancy rates, and set up alerts for the key indicators, such as a sudden increase in demand. They then download the data to their handhelds so that they can access it from almost anywhere on their hotels' property. Today, Carlson managers are pushing data to the handhelds in one of three ways. Most managers use a cradle to connect their handheld to a computer, some sync the data over a wireless LAN, and a few use AT&T's digital wide area network.
In all, Heintzeman says, Carlson has put about 200 people on handhelds at a cost of about $100,000. He reports that things are working well and plans to expand the program to deploy about 6,000 Compaq ipaq Pocket PCs, equipping corporate executives as well as general managers and frontline personnel at more than 600 hotels. SOURCE: Adapted from Danielle Dunne, 'Wireless That Works,' CIO 15 February 2002, 60; and Bob Brewin, 'Hotel Chain Moves to Wireless Data Access," Computerworld, 4 December 2000, 6. Reprinted through the courtesy of CIO. 2002, CXO Media Inc. All rights reserved.