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. 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 by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies.

Challenging economic times 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 20 years ago, either with separate Web sites for each of their hotel locations, or by phone. 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, these systems were not integrated