Human Resources Information System the

Human Resources Information System The situation that Jay Morgan faces as the manager of a series of geographically dispersed locations throughout the Detroit area is one of the factors that have created the increasing level of innovation in the use of distributed systems throughout the hospitality industry.

The Castle Family Restaurant chain of eight restaurants throughout the Detroit area are already challenging the scalability of the processes used for managing them; despite gasoline prices the time required to individually manage human resources processes across of all them clearly will not scale as additional locations are added to the chain. What is required is a stable, secure yet customizable platform that can have applications selectively added to it to compliment the processes being automated from a human resources standpoint across the entire chain.

The intent of this paper is to evaluate how Ray Morgan can accomplish this while also ensuring the revenue management system of the chain stays proprietary (Kimes, Wagner, 2001). Defining an Operating Platform for the Restaurants' Intranet In conjunction with the development of specific process areas that will be automated with the new system including employee scheduling, employee status including hours worked, pay rate, and accumulated hours, payroll, revenue and tax management, Castle Family Restaurants must also define the underlying Intranet platform the entire network will reside on.

The use of Intranets has shown to deliver significantly greater efficiency and cost reductions over time relative to using stand-alone and often non-integrated applications (Bondarouk, Ruel, 2008). Jay Morgan needs to take this into account and define an Intranet strategy that will allow for him to have a portal interface into which specific applications can be selectively installed and integrated.

In conjunction with this, Jay Morgan will also need to have Business Process Management (BPM) workflow applications available in the Intranet development environment to better align the applications to his specific needs. As each restaurant chain has significantly different processes for employee management, payroll, revenue management and revenue management (Bondarouk, Ruel, 2008) the challenge is aligning all of them to the specific objectives the restaurant or hospitality chain is attempting to attain (AMR Research, 2006).

The alignment of applications to the specific process areas is critical to the restaurant being able to attain its long-range goals (Bondarouk, Ruel, 2008). While this is strategic in scope, one of the greatest benefits of restaurants such as the Castle Family restaurant chain is the significant reduction in the amount of time required by managers to manually handle all the process areas and exceptions. Instead, they can concentrate more on those process areas and more importantly, those strategies that have major influence across the entire series of restaurants.

Often when hospitality chains deploy an enterprise-wide Intranet and have these specific applications installed and used by a high percentage of employees, senior managers are able to define entirely new growth strategies (Bondarouk, Ruel, 2008). The time spent managing all of these processes and systems on a per store basis are taking time away from Jay Morgan being able to plan for the future and therefore grow the chain over the long-term.

Having an Intranet platform that has an employee accounting application, scheduling application, employee performance management system, and employee communications system where they can leave ideas for improving the performance of their specific restaurant location can all be integrated through the use of Human Resource Management (HRM) system based on a single portal platform (Bondarouk, Ruel, 2008) Architecturally the Intranet needs to be based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model which will allow for Castle Restaurants to concentrate their efforts on the processes being automated instead of concentrating on-premise systems (Manning, 2006).

This approach to defining the platform will also alleviate the task of having to find Information technologies (it) staff to manage just these applications over time. Ensuring Adoption of the Intranet By far the greatest challenge however will not be technological, it will be in gaining the adoption of the Intranet across the eight locations, and having employees trust it enough over time.

The most critical issue for Castle Family Restaurants is to also get their store managers trained and involved early in the process to ensure they have a sense of ownership for the systems and their application. The greatest impediment for any hospitality or restaurant system is the need for alleviating resistance to change by concentrating on how to infuse ownership throughout both management and employee ranks (Wolff, 2006).

The use of a SaaS-based application will significantly contribute to this aspect of the implementation as it can be rolled out quickly and also tailored to the specific needs of each location. There is a greater level of agility in the development of SaaS-based applications in service businesses (Manning, 2006). There is also the potential of having roles-based logins and security within each location to ensure that the entire system can be kept as a competitive advantage over time (Kimes, Wagner, 2001).

Defining Long-Term Expansion of the System The need for integrating in service applications is critical for the long-term success of the portal. Specifically concentrating on how to link in accounting, finance, and purchasing systems to this Intranet will further.