Information Systems - Hard Rock Cafe - Case Study Example

Hard Rock Café case study Task Restaurant operations Hard Rock’s restaurant operations, according to the Rank Group had different owners of the restaurant and the franchises who had implemented their own systems of management. This means that they were not unified technologically. When the Rank Group acquired Hard Rock restaurant, the restaurants were little fiefdoms and had no standard way of operations. According to Ward, a French fry could mean two different things in different Cafés while else a cheeseburger could have been a chicken sandwich, or even a steak.

" This lack of standards, broken processes and problems with communication channels posed very serious problems to the corporate office on analysis of sales. MerchandisingOne known way of turning off customers lacks goods that they need every time they pass by your business. Hard Rock’s inventory relied on restaurant managers who had no one telling them when there was a shortage of something. The network connecting the cafés was a mess itself. Ward describes the network as “hackerware”.

FinancialHard Rock’s financial system was never updated frequently. For this reason maybe, sometime back, a sack containing $100,000 went missing and sat in the New York City Hard Rock Café for five days without being noticed by anyone. While the employees did not notice the sack, the corporate itself did not know such an amount of money was missing.Task 2Restaurant operationsThe Ward’s group chose the Radius inventory management system as it was built on the Micro Strategy platform. The system was a product of Transatlantic Software and stores all the POS customer data, for instance, merchandise sales, customer demographic and the preference data that is now captured on the web.

MerchandiseSince the sale of merchandise accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars every financial year, the restaurant needed to install a chain-wide merchandise system, which would help them avoid such embarrassments like the opening of Cleveland Hard Rock in summer that had no T-shirts for some weeks.Financial Initially, Hard Rock had three sets of books that kept track of the revenues. The immense problem was that the totals were three very different numbers. In the late 1998, Hard Rock’s financial system required copies of statement in Lotus Notes, 2 members of staff to reproduce the numbers in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and key the numbers into a Lawson Software financial module.

Task 3The CRM is essential in the operations of Hard Rock as it strengthens the relationship between the customer and the restaurant building an online community. This online community is crucial for a business enterprise as the information about customers help the customization of services and information making it possible to invite them for repeat dinners. Photos taken in the restaurants are also posted on eBay where customers can request for their photos. About 70% of those photos are claimed meaning that the restaurant online presence is feltTask 4A customer relationship management (CRM) system tracks the customers both on the web and in the restaurant itself and Hard Rock has implemented Epiphanys CRM product to help them do this efficiently.

The data stored in the CRM differs from that stored in the Point Of Sale (POS) in that the former offers concurrent marketing promotions that are based on user behavior. This may include predicting bands a visitor might like and alert them when those bands play at the local Hard Rock restaurant. On the other hand, data stored on POS include merchandise sales, customer demographics and so on.Works CitedPine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. "Welcome to the experience economy." Harvard business review 76 (1998): 97-105.