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At the end of each day, the executive housekeeper would collect the sheets, check them over, and then, once a week, send the pile by FedEx to headquarters in Crossville. There, a half-dozen clerks would sift through this mountain of paperwork every week to figure out how much to pay housekeepers (based on the number of units cleaned) and supervisors (based on the number of hours worked) and how much to bill resort customers (based on contract stipulations).
During the late 1980s, MasterCorp contracted with programmer Bob Potts to write a program that would calculate payroll and billing. At the very least, it would take the burden of calculations off clerks, essentially turning them into data entry workers.
Potts' initial attempts didn't match the way clerks wanted to enter data. "He'd work all day, and then we'd say, 'No, that's not what we want,'" says Loveday. And so Loveday, then assistant controller, sat with Potts for hours, advising from the business side while learning to write code himself. He also took technical courses at a local college to develop his IT skills. (It was Loveday's influence in the project that led to his becoming IT director in 2003 and, eventually, CIO.)
Potts and Loveday wrote the program in RPG and deployed it on a low-end AS/400 computer -- a platform in Potts' comfort zone. MasterCorp called the software "Bob's Program." Over the years, the program has undergone numerous enhancements, including the capability to calculate overtime in various time zones and states. The back-end automation enabled MasterCorp to acquire more customers without employing additional clerks.
"Our software allows us to do what our competitors" -- mostly mom-and-pop shops -- "can't do," says CFO Kevin Swafford, whom MasterCorp hired in 1997. "We can pay piece rate, comply with federal wage and hour laws."
If Bob's Program was MasterCorp's foray into the strategic use of IT, it was not to be alone for long. In 1998, MasterCorp bought Great Plains, which replaced accounting software Mapics, an application geared more toward manufacturing. The company bought two servers: a Dell 2300 to run the enterprise resource planning software and another AS/400 to balance the growing workload placed on Bob's Program. Consultants also integrated Great Plains with Bob's Program.
At the time, Loveday was still the lone IT guy on staff and reported to Swafford. Not all of their early purchases were top-notch: For example, they bought a server from a local techie that caught on fire. Along with MasterCorp, the two men were slowly learning about technology.
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