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Blog#6

http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=1ABF3FDCEDD34BA28B1817C9C59C753C

Hilario, Emanuel N. (2008) Secure future growth with top 3 financial imperatives, Hospitality technology, Nov.18, 2008.

Summary:

Periods of economics instability usually has strong chilling effect on the restaurant industry. When a restaurant steps into its downtime, with the cost increasing and guests reducing, the decisions it makes during this period become more crucial. The author took McCormick & Schmick's as an example, telling us three underlying rules of making decisions, especially under the financial pressure. First is to make the balance sheet your friend, which means we should understand that capital preservation is always the key of financial operation. Spend money that is not necessary during a downturned economy is the biggest mistakes as an operator. Restaurant should focus on maximizing every dollar that comes through the door by emphasizing brand fundamentals and encouraging mangers to focus first on easy productivity. Second, we should try to find out those superior ROI ( return of investment) generators among all the good ideas of how to run a restaurant. The key is to focus on low risk, high return revenue generating opportunities that also offer flexibility. Third, even during the hard time technologies become sort of a luxury, the leverage technologies that provide a real-time view of profits and the cash position are still necessary. For instance, Financial metrics are an extremely effective method for tracking sales, traffic, labor and more, which allow operators to measure the planned budget against actual sales and costs and can also include the ability to do real-time A/P, weekly A/P and forecasting. Technology can also help to track marketing campaigns, so as to decide where to locate marketing dollars. However this requires the operators' ability to deal with a very fast changing environment.

Reflection:

This article became hot probably because the financial crisis now. Restaurants are suffering big trouble now, facing the problem of cost increasing and guests reducing. This article is telling people how to operate a restaurant especially during the tough time. I agree with the author that during a downturn, targeting money to a right place is better than putting money in all places. Saving money is the most crucial thing in the world in this period of time. I also was impressed that the author's emphasizing the improtance of technologies in restaurants even in downturn of the industry. Becasue of the financial crisis, people are struggling between cutting down fundings and developing technologies. During our project with Marriott, we also discussed the relationship between this two. Apparently, developing or introducing some technologies are spending money unnecessarily. However, after we do some simple caculation, the answer would be different. Take hotel room as an example. The automation ambiance might cost an amount of money for a hotel to install in every hotel room. But, according to a related research, automation ambiance can help the save the energy by 40%. Put this situation into a one-year-long term, the saving is significant compared to the cost of installation. So, I agree with the auther that, as a restaurant, even it does not need to be the most advanced, but it should have some basic and good technologies that can support the operation.

Blog #5

Koroneos, George (2008), 6 Steps to Better Self-Service, Hospitality Technology, Oct. 9, 2008


http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=84FFF9B680574E1095BAFDEBAD9E9E11


Summary:

Self-service technology (Kiosks) is highly recommended to restaurant industry for many years, however, according to the 2008 Hospitality Technology Self Service Technology Study, it is slowly accepted and adopted by restaurants. The author points out that the reason why restaurants hesitantly catch on self-service technology is they don't believe that it would fit into their particular establishment or there is no guest demand. In fact, using self-service technology can bring lots of benefits to restaurants, especially for those fast casual locations. Nevertheless, there are still many problems that operators need to consider before they invest money to install new systems in their restaurants. After several years' experience of using kiosks, Hospitality Technology concludes six practices when considering and installing kiosks. First,make sure that the kiosk is integrated with entire POS system, because an integrated cross-platform system will save time and energy when trying to manage expenses and receipts or when it's time to call the help desk.Second, pay attention to the size of the kiosk. Third, be ready to deal with technology issues, which means that a restaurant has at least one employee can fix the problems when needed. Fourth, try to make the kiosk obvious to costomers so that they can learn the technology and start playing with it. Fifth, self-service is not necessarily fast service. It is not the point during service because with the self-service system customers are so busy working that they don't feel they are waiting for something. The last, even it is said that self-service technology has lots of advantages, in fact it still takes sometime make customers accept and get used to this system.

Reflection

When I read this article, the first thing came into my mind is the first blog I posted here. The article for the first blog is about a restaurant in which touch screens are installed on every table to support self-service and game system. In that article the author proves that self-service helps a lot to a smooth operation and labor saving.  A similar point is presented in this article as well. The author points out that self-service has lots of advantages and lists six tips in the article for operators to consider about during the adoption of self-service system.  I totally agree with the author about the positive attitude of self-service.  Also, I believe the six tips for adoption are of great importance, especially for those operators who have never tried self-service systems. Some of them are necessary steps for consideration before operators really put kiosks in their restaurants, for or example, the compatibility between the new system and existing POS system. If an operator imports kiosks of self-service to his or her restaurant which have not been confirmed that they will definitely work well with the existing POS system, it might cause a big problem. Once they are not compatible to each other, at least one of them has to be redeployed, which might cause big lost to the restaurant. For the other tips, it is the same.  I believe that as the author said self-service systems can bring profit to restaurants far more than the money invested in installation if they are appropriately used and well accepted by customers.

Blog#4

CityCenter to Deliver Technologically Advanced Guestrooms in 2009, Hospitality Technology, Sept. 16, 2008

Summary: 

This article describes a super advanced guest room which will open in late 2009. By Cooperating with Control4 corporation, CityCenter develops a new level of personalized automation in guestrooms which will make the rooms debut the most advanced guestroom technology in the country, and become the benchmark for the hospitality industry. This smart room pays much attention to guests' in room experience. For example, once the guests entrance the room, it will recognize whether it is the first time they get in the room and welcome the guests by light, curtains, TV and so on. Guests can control all the utilities in the room by an integrated one-touch control and make changes of their preference. Keyless locks are adopted by the hotel to reduce key failure. 42-inch LCD HDTV can be connected to guests' laptop or other digital equipments as a "big-screen". In addition, this TV set could be a communication center especially working for displaying the messages of voice mails or package receipts and so forth. Besides, not only lighting, curtain opening, temperature could be visually controlled through TV, but also the wake up system could be combine in TV set. CityCenter will use fiber to offer on gigabit of bandwidth for the guests' Internet access and hotel operations. They also try to make the hotel "green" while introducing all kinds of technologies, for instance, energy and water saving, by indicating a suitable light level, room temperature, and automatically turning of the energy consuming equipments.

Reflection:

For Marriott in room wireless technology project, our team is looking for a method or we can say a central control device to integrate all kinds of wireless technologies in a guest room. So that guests can easily use all the in room technologies they need. The reason we think about this is because sometimes even there are full of advanced technologies in the guest room, but if guests do not know how to use them or do not use them at all because of the inconvenience of controlling, the guests' satisfaction falls down. Just imagine, if you pay 10 minutes try to find out how to turn on the light or how to adapt the light level but end it by failure, do you think there is any possibility that you will still feel satisfied of the hotel? So in my opinion, the article presents a right direction of developing a future guest room. What's more, the author emphasizes more at the automation of those technologies in a guest room, so called smart room. With the smart enough start of the in room experience, and the integrated control center--TV, and the comfortable and abundant experience the advanced technologies, I am sure that this kind of guest room will lead the the hospitality industry to a new milestone.

URL:

http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=9B8654F972FB45F3B5C8EF0A22C8E10E

Blog#3

Vasquez, Leonard (2008), Meet High Speed Internet Demands, Hospitality Technology, Sept. 30th, 2008

URL:http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=2E4B401F4A43439D9BCF18D01C45FCBD

Summary: 

Nowadays, guests now require not only Internet but high speed Internet when they stay in a hotel. If the speed of Internet is too slow, that would bring guests bad experience of the whole hotel. So how to make sure that we offer guests a high-quality Internet experience is one of the most important things among the hotel operation. The first of the concerns associated with hotel bandwidth is the ability to keep up with the growing bandwidth demands that will satisfy guests’ Internet experience. Besides operators should make sure that they have enough bandwidth to support new applications and services and have a solution which is easy to manage to find out who and what is using up the bandwidth in the hotel.  It can be concluded to three words: reliability, knowledge, and management. The connection redundancy which will ensure guests always connect to Internet, the aggregation which can combine the bandwidth of the hotel’s multiple low cost Internet circuits to increase Internet speed, and AUP and landing page backup which ensures the hotel brand continues to be presented to the guest even when the HSIA gateway fails, are used to ensure reliability. Knowledge is also important to the Internet speed management. With knowledge operators can know who and what application is occupying the bandwidth so as to keep enough bandwidth. And the proactive monitoring and alerting can notify the operator automatically the problem of the devices in the guestroom before a guest notices that. With the p2p management operators are able to stop some applications or limit the amount of bandwidth they can use, and also shape an enough bandwidth for those critical administrative applications. Operators can also use VPN to make sure that the administrative applications and data are traversing safely. 

Reflection:

The author has good opinion of managing Internet bandwidth in a hotel. I totally agree that the bad Internet experience would influence guests' hotel experience. With the development of in-building technology,  the requirements of guests becomes more and more, especially for those are already well achieved in hotels like minibars, heat, internet and so on. The author advices many good methods to manage the bandwidth so that hotel or restaurant operators are able to provide enough high speed Internet to guests. In my opinion, all of the solutions are great. What impresses me most is aggregation. It is so creative to combine many existing low speed internet to make a related high speed internet, which could save lots of money. This reminds  me that day when we visited UD IT center, the man there told us they use different connector to achieve the speed of one Gbps with Cat 5, which also saves a lot of money for the university.  Also the bandwidth management is very interesting. Although it sounds good to know the occupancy of the bandwidth of every application and be alerted of the problems of the devices in guest rooms in advance, the author does not tell us what exactly the software or application is used to do the management, either for the traffic shaping.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

blog#2

Koroneos, George. (2007) Wireless Access Everywhere, Hospitality Technology,  1 Sept. 2007

URL: http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=E6A4E4B2F790464293ADC6524A996382 

Summary:

Nowadays, internet has been a necessary to hotels. What's more, it is required every spot in a hotel should be covered by wireless signal. Some brands believe that guests demand WiFi, so they require it to be accessible throughout the whole property. Winegardner & Hammons is the earliest hotel management company that adopted wireless, and made it available to every guest rooms and meeting location. This company is also looking for some new wireless technologies that take advantage of the WiFi signal, which allows guests to be able to work or access e-mail from the lobby, restaurant, and hallways. However, when hotel owners look to add wireless to older properties, they meet a big tech challenge--they need to rewire the hotel's infrastructure to connect the wireless access points. Marcus Hotel & Resorts installs a solution to pipe internet signals through the existing power system, which has proven beneficial to larger hotels that are older and harder to retrofit. At the same time, redundant internet services are installed to  make sure that there is never downtime on the system. The author also points out that wireless is used not only for bells and whistles, but also for the staff communication. Also, this communication system can inform an arrival group that a guest has entered the hotel and needs service. In order to make the wireless more security, many hotels adopt a branded sign-in page for the time when the guest opens their browser. 

Reflection:

This article points out the importance of wireless internet to hotels, and how much contribution the wireless technology has made to this industry. Many years ago, when wired internet are widely applied in hotels, people started to thinking about how to make it easier and easier. And people are getting big progress year by year. At first we gained the achievement of making internet wireless, and then getting bigger coverage. And what is followed is the security of wireless internet. I remember last time when we went to Marriott headquarter, Mr. Neil told us lots of modern technologies that are used in the hotel system, and wireless technology was include. He also showed us some of devices that used to support this technology. Thanks to the trip, I know many kinds of wireless technology, such as WiFi, Cellular phone and data, cordless phones, Wimax/LET, RFID, Ultra, Subgig controls, and ZIGEE. What these technologies have already given us, and what they might give us in the future?  Email, video, music, communication, all of them now are available to people who has a terminal in a hotel. This article was written one year ago. So I think some of the content in it could be classified in to the part of  “history” of wireless. Now, with a cell phone we can connect to internet through wireless. So I believe that the application of wireless technology would be better and better, even from in-building to out-building.

blog#1

Lorden, Abigail A. (2008) "Eat, Drink and Play Games." Hospitality technology, 08 Sept. 2008.



URL: http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=57E685C6923646828D0A367993A3EA2F





Summary:

This article describes a creative restaurant system which combines eating, drinking and playing games together. It was started by a restaurant entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, who introduced games into restaurants, by which he pushed his entertainment companies to a new high level. It seemed to be a venture at first, and then was proved to be a big success. At first they mounted touch screen terminals at each table for the purpose of operation of games. The game system is built with a Web 2.0 approach and employing XML to move data around, which makes users feel like using the internet, although it is a closed network. Right after the touch screen terminals were on the tables, they became the foundation of the restaurant automation. The touch screen terminals are loaded with digital restaurant menus and a breadth of games that facilitate interaction among guests. With this system, customers can order food and drink by themselves from the terminals, play games while waiting food, and pay bills. Customers get one hour free games when eat in the restaurant. If they intend to play more, it charges. In the future not far from now, users will be able to use their cell phone as an operator to play games. In addition, thanks to this system, a restaurant is able to manager more tables with less waiters or waitresses and provide higher service quality. The Bushnells is working on introducing other restaurant brands to use this platform.



Reflection:

When I read the title of this article, I felt a little confused: what is the link between “eat, drink” and “play games”? And then I went through the article. I am so impressed by the creative idea of introducing game platform into a restaurant. I was always thinking about the waiting line problem of a restaurant in the rush hour when I was in China. It is a serious problem because the large population in China. We use waiting numbers, we try to put a TV or Video at restaurants, but it seems not satisfy the customer very well. Firstly, when customers get their waiting numbers, some of them stay in the waiting area, which makes no big difference from waiting in a line, except that they can sit down in stead of standing. Secondly, some of the customers might walk round after getting their waiting numbers. They meet problems as well. Not every of them are so lucky that they are back at the perfect time, they would have to wait for some while or they have to take the waiting numbers and wait once more because they missed the call. We never think about providing games for the waiting customers. So that is great! I don’t worry about the technology platform of this idea. The only point I concern by now is the time of table occupation. Since customers have so much fun sitting at the table no mater with food, drink or not, it may make them occupy the table for longer time than that they spend in a regular restaurant. Although the author presents a countermeasure to this problem—free game for an hour and then charged, unless the charge of the game, whether by time or by game, is higher than the amount the restaurant would receive from food or drink service at the same period of time, the income would not be able to cover the opportunity cost.