Introduction

If you go to the Hardrock Café Web site today (May 1, 2014), you will be impressed. You will find a very slick and visually exciting home page that rotates you through stunning scenes of Hardrock hotels, casinos, dining locations and concert venues around the world. There is a “Rewards” tab that allows you to expand your personal information profile, track travel and vacation plans, and monitor your earned points from any number of Hardrock customer community involvement schemes. You can shop for a wide range of Hardrock branded products for men and for women as well as pricier rock and roll paraphernalia and collectors’ items. You will learn that Hardrock has nearly 200 locations across 51 different countries and that the firm’s history traverses the glory days of the rock and roll genre from 1971 to the present. All in all Hardrock Café purports to be a great success story. But things at Hardrock Café were not always so wonderful and there was a time in the 1990’s when the enterprise faced the possibility of going under as a business.

As other theme-based restaurant chains like Plant Hollywood came on the scene and as organizations like resort and hotel chains sought to attract the 20 to 30+ year-old demographic, Hardrock began to lose its distinctiveness as a brand and a venue. Compounding these strategic issues, internal operations at Hardrock began to unravel, complicating the management and control of the business. It turns out that greatly improved data management practices were to a considerable extent the solution to both sets of problems.

Problems at Hardrock

Running a global restaurant and entertainment business is challenging at many different levels. Day-to-day operations need to be coordinated to ensure that product is available in keeping with customer wants and that quality remains high and cost are kept under