Front Office Management Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue on Analytics in Sports, Part I: General Sports Applications

Sports is a rapidly growing application area for analytics. The use of analytics is pervasive in the professional sports community as evidenced by the increased role for those practicing sports analytics in front-office management and coaching. Part I of this Special Issue on Analytics in Sports is devoted to the application of a variety of methodologies to a broad range of sports. The papers analyze golf, hockey, baseball, motorcycle racing, and college football. The methodologies employed draw from many areas of analytics including optimization, probabilistic modeling, and choice models.

Front-office managers get training in excellence

Front-office managers get training in excellence

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A Comparative Study between U.S.A. and Spain

This paper surveys the marketing executives of the top companies in Spain with more than 100 million euros on net sales and reports the status of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions in their companies. The results are compared with the U.S.A. status reported by a previous study developed by InformationWeek Research in 2000 with a sample based on Fortune 500. One hundred and thirty-six companies participated in this study. The data provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the CRM in Spain in comparison with USA. Some viable actions are recommended to improve the usage of CRM and to reshape the future of these systems. INTRODUCTION Although there are few major companies today who would not agree that CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is vital to survival, defining its essence is proving to be a difficult task. If one were to ask what CRM means, one would obtain many different definitions. All over the world, the term CRM is used to refer to strategies, processes, and solutions related to customers, formerly represented by concepts such as Direct Marketing, One-toOne Marketing, Mass Customization, Micromarketing, etc. CRM is about forming a relationship with customers. CRM is about customer loyalty. The aim of this study is to explore the current status of CRM in Spain’s top 600 companies. The results are then compared with a previous U.S. study conducted by InformationWeek Research in 2000. Specifically, this latter study used a sample based on Fortune 500. This will allow us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of CRM usage in Spain, as well as in the U.S.A. It might also help the top management in Spain to reshape the future of CRM in their companies, as well as serving as a reference point for the Spanish companies to effectively formulate their CRM competitive strategy. LITERATURE REVIEW The implementation of CRM to support marketing, sales and services functions may be traced back to the 1990’s. Marketing was the first functional area to embrace the concept of CRM and tailor it to the needs of its managers. In the early nineties, technologies such as Enterprises Resource Planning (ERP) and data warehousing applications have played an important role in optimizing and reengineering business processes, which is familiarly called “back office” (Sower et al., 2001). Nowadays, technologies as supply chain management and CRM close the circle into the front office management. What makes CRM so attractive is its ability to increase the revenues of those companies using it. Enterprises implementing CRM are pulling ahead of their competitors in terms of customer satisfaction and retention, new business development, and profitability. Not only is customer contact more efficient, but it is also more effective. Particularly important is the ability of multiple business units −marketing, sales, service, support, and product development− to share and leverage the same set of customer, product, and service information. A review of CRM literature reveals that there are various models and surveys of CRM in the U.S.A. and Western Europe. Recently, International Data Consultancy (IDC, 1999) proposed a comprehensive CRM model, as shown in Figure 1. In this model, IDC depicts a CRM as a process with four main activities: (1) analyzing data contained in the enterprise data warehouse, (2) modeling the data through data mining techniques, (3) adjusting the model into an operational field, and (4) tracking the results and closing the circle of CRM strategy. Figure 1. CRM Model

A Front Office and Risk Management Tool for Pricing OTC 
 Derivatives

In this paper we propose a proxy for the implied volatility of OTC equity derivatives. Our methodology rests on two pillars: (1) we exploit the information embedded in the price of the underlying asset by combining two measures of price volatility (2) we pool the stocks by sector in order to make a better use of their common features. After estimating a relationship between implied volatility of traded options and traditional risk measures using a set of panels, we are able to test the model performance both in sample and out of sample. We show that using our volatility measure leads to considerably more accurate pricing results than those obtained using the RiskMetrics only.

Women in Hotel Management

An examination of 11 U.S. hotel chains' 1998 filings with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows that nearly half of the managers in hotel properties are women. Specifically, in a sample of over 470 hotels comprising 5,447 individual managers, the split between male and female managers was 54 percent to 46 percent. However, just over 15 percent of the general managers were women, and most of the women are clustered in just a few management positions-namely, catering, sales and marketing, personnel, reservations, and housekeeping. For example, nearly 82 percent of the catering managers were women, and that figure was 74 percent for personnel managers. By contrast, the percentage of women in two positions that typically lead to the GM job-rooms (front office) manager and F&B manager-is nowhere near as high. While 53 percent of the front-office managers were women, only 17 percent of F&B managers were women. Women were likewise underrepresented on hotels' executive committees. Still, the overall picture is one of progress.

Women in hotel management

An examination of 11 U.S. hotel chains' 1998 filings with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows that nearly half of the managers in hotel properties are women. Specifically, in a sample of over 470 hotels comprising 5,447 individual managers, the split between male and female managers was 54 percent to 46 percent. However, just over 15 percent of the general managers were women, and most of the women are clustered in just a few management positions-namely, catering, sales and marketing, personnel, reservations, and housekeeping. For example, nearly 82 percent of the catering managers were women, and that figure was 74 percent for personnel managers. By contrast, the percentage of women in two positions that typically lead to the GM job-rooms (front office) manager and F&B manager-is nowhere near as high. While 53 percent of the front-office managers were women, only 17 percent of F&B managers were women. Women were likewise underrepresented on hotels' executive committees. Still, the overall picture is one of progress.

Branch Rickey as a Public Manager: Fulfilling the Eight Responsibilities of Public Management

Branch Rickey as a Public Manager: Fulfilling the Eight Responsibilities of Public Management

The meaning and management of yield in hotels

Definitions of yield management vary in terms of their content and focus. Develops a “best fit” definition of yield management of the hotel sector by reviewing the literature in this area and extracting the key words and central meanings used. In addition, produces a list of eight features using a comparison and analysis of the views of London‐based front office managers and features of yield management applications promoted through vendors′ sales literature. Together these eight features illustrate what an ideal yield management application would offer. While all of the applications currently for sale within the UK offer some of these features, none of them are capable of performing the complete range.

Incorporation of Operational Audits in Hotel Front Office Courses

One purpose of this research is to identify and document patterns in the current practice of operational audits of hotel front office operations. A second objective is to develop a sample section of a “generic” operational audit checklist which reflects both the most salient features of current practice and normative suggestions for future, broadly based use. Ways to incorporate the generic audit checklist into a typical front office management course as well as into current hotel operations are discussed in the final section of the paper.

The Front Office Manager: Key to Hotel Communications. Denney G. Rutherford. FIU Hospitality Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1985, pp. 38-48. School of Hospitality Management, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199. $7.50 annual subscription

The Front Office Manager: Key to Hotel Communications. Denney G. Rutherford. FIU Hospitality Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1985, pp. 38-48. School of Hospitality Management, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33199. $7.50 annual subscription

Expert front office management by computer

A great deal of interest has been fostered in the West by Japanese projects to develop ‘intelligent’ computer systems. Almost all of the so-called expert systems designed so far have been related to applications in science or engineering where problem-solving is highly structured. Although intelligent computer systems can be of value to managers, all computer-based hotel systems currently on the market are intended to function at a clerical level. Thus in a reservation system, the computer does none of the important work of managing occupancies and room rates, it merely keeps records and files. This article describes work that is being undertaken at the University of Surrey to help hotel reservation managers make accept/refuse decisions. The expert system that is being developed tries to reproduce the expertise of real reservation managers on an inexpensive, business microcomputer.