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In the Beginning
Back in 2001, MasterCorp's IT budget was a grand total of $27,000. Without an official IT department, the company spent that money on inexpensive technology like a $300 cable modem (though it had installed accounting software and built a workforce scheduling application some years earlier). In 2003, MasterCorp formed its first IT department and last year increased IT spending to a relatively high $340,000. IT continued its ascent this year when Loveday, who had joined the company two decades earlier as an accountant, became MasterCorp's first CIO, reporting to Grindstaff. Also this year, MasterCorp formed an IT steering committee to prioritize critical projects such as disaster planning.
Today it's virtually impossible to separate operations from technology. The now-webified homegrown application drives MasterCorp's core operations: recruiting, training, scheduling, managing, tracking and paying some 2,500 housekeepers, as well as helping with the procurement and distribution of housecleaning products. "Technology has really supported our growth," says Grindstaff. "We couldn't be doing what we're doing without it."
Actually, MasterCorp used to do everything without technology -- a Herculean task involving mounds of paper.
Here's how it worked: At each resort, MasterCorp has a satellite office with an executive housekeeper/site manager, an assistant housekeeper, and enough supervisors and housekeepers to keep units clean. Each morning the resort would give the executive housekeeper a list of units and corresponding guest checkout times and instructions for special projects, such as deep cleanings.
The executive housekeeper would thumb through the printout and identify which units needed to be cleaned, then create the day's schedule, which included handwriting an assignment sheet for the housekeeper and an inspector sheet for the supervisor for each unit. "At big sites, it would take three hours a day just to figure out what needed to be cleaned via paperwork," Loveday says. "The executive housekeeper would often try to get the information from the resort the day before and do the schedule at night."
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