Among those initiatives are applications for managing the process of moving residents into and out of the Holiday Retirement facilities and managing maintenance work orders. One project this year will be the implementation of an electronic time-clock system for the company's 9,000 employees, a system that's expected to reduce payroll paperwork and associated costs. In addition, McDowell plans to install eTrust IT security software from Computer Associates to help manage system access for employees--a problem in an industry with a high rate of employee turnover--and for intrusion detection. Help-desk applications from CA also are on the planned-projects list.
Holiday Retirement also is considering several business-intelligence projects to extract data from the company's ERP systems and provide it to executives through a portal, McDowell says. Altogether, McDowell says his to-do list contains about 70 IT projects, and he expects to make significant progress on about 25 of them this year.
At Harrah's Entertainment Inc., the goal for 2004 is to use technology to improve the time-honored casino tradition of giving perks to good customers. That will require turning the massive data warehouse used to collect and analyze guest information derived from Harrah's Total Rewards customer-loyalty program into a source of real-time information. The goal: to track the activities and spending habits of its top 100,000 VIP customers and reward them in real time. Harrah's has plenty of company--three-quarters of survey respondents say they'll establish processes that support real-time information this year, and 61% say data-warehouse technology is a priority.
The Total Rewards system is powered by warehouse technology from NCR Corp.'s Teradata division. Harrah's plans to adapt that system with Teradata's active data-warehousing technology to perform customer-data analysis in real time, rather than after a guest has left a casino. Using messaging middleware from Tibco Software Inc., the data warehouse will be tied into recently installed customer-contact applications from Blue Martini Software Inc.
Harrah's, which operates 26 casinos, is expecting solid sales growth this year, but tax increases recently enacted in Illinois, New Jersey, and other states likely will take a bite out of profits. CIO Tim Stanley has his own bottom line: Harrah's measures IT spending as an operating profit or loss, and Stanley expects 6% operating-profit growth on the IT budget this year and 7% profit growth on IT capital spending.
Office-supply company Office Depot Inc. has several major IT initiatives planned for the year involving supply-chain management, merchandise planning, and warehouse operations. The company has multiple sales channels, including direct delivery to companies, Office Depot aisles within grocery stores, and online sales; only 46% of its sales come from its retail stores. Business technology and processes for managing and restocking those multiple channels must be flexible and efficient, CIO Patty Morrison says.
