Vanderbilt Imperial Hotels is a luxury chain with facilities and resorts at some forty locations across the United States. Every day, its housekeeping staff changes enough sheets to cover several baseball stadiums, its bell staff transports a volume of luggage that would fill a few jumbo jets, and its wait staff serves prodigious quantities of food. Yet as important as all this physical work is, the whole chain would break down without management making sure that each location has the resources it needs to meet the challenges of each day. This is an example of the fact that management needs information in order to