1. Using any benchmark data that you can find, including information from this textbook, what are some benchmark metricsthat Lisa could be using to assess the efficiency of her humanresource management operations? To what extent does the Hotel Paris’s quality service orientation enter into how Lisa’s metrics should compare?

2. Throughout this textbook, we’ve discussed various specific examples of how human resource management departments have been reducing the cost of delivering their services. Keeping in mind the Hotel Paris’s service quality orientation, please list and explain with examples how Lisa Cruz could use at least five of these.

3. Focusing only on human resource information systems for a moment, which systems would you suggest Lisa consider recommending for the Hotel Paris? Why?

4. Explain with detailed examples how Lisa can use free online and governmental sources to accomplish at least part of what you propose in your previous answers.

5. Give three examples of fee-based online tools you suggest Lisa use.

6. Do you suggest Lisa use a PEO? Why?

The Hotel Paris’s competitive strategy is “To use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitability.” HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies and activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies. Challenging economic times in the past few years brought the drawbacks of the Hotel Paris’s relatively small size into sharp relief. Large chains like Marriott had vast online reservations capabilities with huge centralized systems that easily and economically handled reservations requests from throughout the world. By comparison, the Hotel Paris still handled reservations much as hotels did 15 years ago, either with separate Web sites for each of their hotel locations, e-mail, or an 800 number.

Their human resource management information systems were similarly primitive. Lisa had managed to install several separate information systems, such as for performance appraisals. However, as she discussed one day over lunch with the CFO, the HR systems were not integrated. Therefore, if an employee changed his or her name, for instance, through marriage, people in Lisa’s office had to execute all those name changes manually on all the various employee rosters and benefits plans.

This lack of integration was bad enough in boom times, but was worse as the economy soured. The CFO pointed out to her that the amount of money they were spending on human resource management administration was about 30% higher than it was at larger chains such as Marriott. He understood that large size brings economies of scale. But he believed there had to be something they could do to reduce the cost of administering human resource management.

Lisa’s solution was to get the CFO’s approval to have several software consulting firms including IBM, Accenture, and Oracle provide proposals for how to integrate the hotel’s HR information systems. After getting the CFO’s and CEO’s approval, they contracted with one vendor and installed the system.