Central Command

For growing hotel and restaurant companies, maintaining control over widespread broadband networks and keeping in touch with remote locations and managers ranks as one of the biggest headaches. Increasingly, hospitality companies are turning to a variety of turnkey solutions to manage networks of employees and locations.

Keeping control has become a central concern for hospitality operators and they have taken varied routes. For Champps Entertainment, which owns and operates 51 Champps restaurants and franchises 13 more, managing its growing 50,000-plus workforce poses a significant challenge for its five-person IT department, according to Matt Selander, POS help desk specialist. The Champps IT department manages and maintains all IT operations for restaurant, corporate and field personnel. The department's primary focus is maintaining each store's four desktops, corporate office desktops and laptops, in addition to the company's point-of-sale (POS) system, Aloha Table Service Version 5.3 from Radiant Systems (radiantsystems.com). Selander and his team also run the help desk, which helps personnel solve technical problems.

Back in 1995, the IT department recognized a need for remote management software that would help them troubleshoot and maintain its widespread and distributed network. Champps went with Symantec's (symantec.com) pcAnywhere, which has allowed Champps to remotely troubleshoot everything from remote stores' email systems to problems with the Aloha file server.

"We use it for everything. It's much easier than having us walk them through it verbally," comments Selander. "Computer experience is not a job requirement for restaurant management, so it's nice to easily access their system to identify problems for them."

Remote controls

With pcAnywhere, Champps can easily update menu specials across all locations. "When we create new menu items, we have to create an item number in the POS at our main office. We then use FTP to transfer that data to all 50 stores and make the necessary programming changes on their terminals or servers," explains Selander. "It takes 20 seconds for us to make a simple price change; it's much more difficult to walk an inexperienced computer user through the process."

The remote access also ensures better security. "We don't leave credit card numbers for managers to retrieve, so if a store needs to retrieve a credit card number, we use our higher administrative access to access the information they need," says Selander.

Within the past year and a half, Champps made the decision to bring its help desk support in-house, meaning the Champps IT department is now tasked with responding to after-hours issues, as well as everyday troubleshooting, maintenance and support.

The IT team is outfitted with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, allowing them to use pcAnywhere and to tap into PCs and servers when they are on call over the weekend, provided they are within range of a Wi-Fi hotspot. "Since taking the help desk in-house the stores have enjoyed quicker response times and decreased down time for hardware and software failures," notes Selander.

Global reach

For Hyatt International, control and security came from finding a single, global network integrator that could provide a solution for its domestic and international properties. Hyatt wanted to be able to focus on its core business in order to continue to grow and develop innovative hotel management applications. The company did not want to manage its own network.

Hyatt International also needed to upgrade a six-year-old frame relay network that connected each of its hotels to its Chicago headquarters in a hub-and-spoke design. The dedicated lines that it wanted to replace were low-bandwidth, ranging from 16K bit/sec to 256K bit/sec, and expensive to maintain.

In addition Hyatt wanted to increase the bandwidth between its shared service centers and headquarters. The company needed to be able to communicate directly between sites, without having all communications coming back through their international headquarters in Chicago. Hyatt wanted to implement multiprotocol label switching service (MPLS) technology in order to give priority to its most critical application, the reservation and booking system, and to realize additional operational efficiencies.

Hyatt also needed to rapidly provision services at the Grand Hyatt Beijing within a 40 day window in order to avoid the overlapping costs of vendor transition and the complexity of interim solutions.

Faced with few companies that could handle the complex range of networking needs, Hyatt finally selected Telstra (telstra.com) for its global network services linking Hyatt International's Chicago headquarters to its overseas hotels. The network includes high-speed IP connectivity between its Chicago headquarters and 50 hotels located throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Asia Pacific region and Latin America. Other managed hotels will be given the opportunity to join the global network over time.

Hyatt's new network also links into several centralized and shared service centers that handle key business applications such as reservations, back- office processing and property management systems (PMS).

Telstra's solution offers each hotel its own custom-made Service Level Agreement (SLA), allowing each hotel to be billed individually. The agreement outsources Hyatt's network management and hardware provisioning to Telstra, thereby allowing Hyatt to concentrate on its core business, promoting its global brand and marketing its hotels.

With this network, Hyatt was now able to meet it's objectives on-time and rapidly advance the "go-to-market" solutions required by Hyatt International. They were also able to meet the 40 day provisioning requirement for the Grand Beijing Hyatt, turning it up in approximately one third of the time that this would normally require.

The MPLS solution enabled Hyatt to make a number of efficiency improvements in its systems operations. Hyatt consolidated its customer reservation and accounting activities into common Shared Services Centers providing consistent services to customers from wherever they called.

In this new network Hyatt upgraded its bandwidth, which typically ran at 16kbps, to 128 kbps without increasing costs. Hyatt's mission critical customer reservation system is guaranteed 30 percent of the bandwidth at all times for optimal customer experience.

"Telstra was prepared to commit to robust SLAs and has more than met the reliability Hyatt was looking for," states Gebhard Rainer, Hyatt's vice president of hotel finance and technology. "This gives us greater flexibility while maintaining the highest standards for the customer experience."