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Canyon Ranch & IT Solutions

Canyon Ranch Case Study

Case Study-Canyon Ranch

Canyon Ranch Resorts

The case study is related to a thorough analysis of Canyon Ranch which is a premium service provide and a market leader in the spa industry. Where Canyon Ranch has managed to attract and retain its customers with exceptional quality of customer service over the years, it is facing a competition from various market players. Since personalized customer care is the cornerstone of Canyon Ranch's business model, there is a concern that adoption of hi-tech technology may affect the level of human touch (which is a signature of Canyon Ranch) in the overall vacation experience. The case study is intended to examine whether adoption of new technology i.e. Customer Relationship management system and business intelligence system, will benefit Canyon Ranch or not.

The Technology

The technology used for analyzing this case study is MS Work and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Adobe Acrobat Reader enabled the reading as well notes making while reading the case study. On the other hand, MS Word is used for making the report.

As far as the case study is concerned, it is related to adoption of customer relationship management system and business unit intelligence system. Customer relationship management system (CRM) is a management software allowing integration of overall sales and marketing operations such as customer and client management, sales force management, even marketing and customer service (Shaw & Reed, 1999). Whereas Business Intelligence system is strategic management software which allows integration of data related to overall business operations to facilitate decision making (Rud, 2009). This particular management system has a data integration, manipulation and forecasting as fundamental features.

Available Information

The case study entails details about the business model, vision and business processes of Canyon Ranch. It also contains a detailed account of the earlier use of technology by Canyon Ranch. The case study explains how the Canyon Ranch has managed to maintain the impeccable quality of service by replacing computerization by human touch. Other than these basic details, the case study also contains the nature of competition that it is facing along with the details of services offered in its resorts.

Currently, Canyon Ranch has a competitive advantage over other market players due to its established and integrated Spa and Healthcare services. It has basic IT software which was designed by in-house team and has been used for recording transaction and simple data manipulation; whereas most of the operations are handled by dedicated customers' coordinators. Due to overdependence on Customers Coordinators, the service level of Canyon Ranch is always at jeopardy however thorough training and suitable compensation has acted as its main strength so far. Overall information also explained that Spa is main revenue generation units whereas Healthcare services have less contribution in profit generation but they add panache to overall aura of the resort.

Pre-Analysis of the Case Study

The given case study has provided a reasonable account of Canyon Ranch. However, the case study has presented anecdotes instead of empirical data. Most of its data is in simple records form which is difficult to be manipulated for strategic decision making and predictive analysis. On the other hand, this available data relates to last ten years performance and data related to prior periods has no or less authenticity. Therefore, lack of authentic and advanced integrated data is a major obstacle that has appeared during analysis of this case study. Also, less or no information about the services offered by the competitions and technologies used by them also makes it difficult to analyze the current position of Canyon Ranch in the market and competitive advantage enjoyed by it.

Analysis of Canyon Ranch's Business Model

During the analysis of Canyon Ranch's business model, it was found that Canyon Ranch has managed to thrive as market leader all these years only on the basis of its personalized customer care. However, as a business enterprise, it is only dependent on numbers provided by its basic software which does not allow any analysis or manipulative decision making. With increase in competition, it is important for an enterprise to know trends of its performance and also the efficiency and effectiveness of its services and business operations.

It was found that Canyon Ranch has been operating below capacity or has been using its facility inefficiently whereas using the assets in the best economic combination is a basic business rule. Secondly, over-dependence on Customer coordinators for the sake of personalized service, is making their overall service model highly prone to human error. Secondly, customer coordinators are also over-burdened due to excessive data entry and follow-ups.

In order to introduce more efficiency and effectiveness in Canyon Ranch's operations, it is important that an integrated automated system is introduced which can not only help in managing the customers, sales and marketing activities but also facilitate decision making and strategic analysis.

Recommendations

Canyon Ranch has been a market leader for a considerable long time. However, in today's robust market, competition is growing every day. In order to ensure that Canyon Ranch retains its market share and keeps on showing steady growth, it is important to introduce automation in its overall business processes. The idea behind this solution is not replace human touch or existing workforce but to utilize this workforce which over-indulged in unnecessary data entry and follow-ups, in the most effective manner.