With the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City this year, Park City, Utah--the venue for many of the ski and snowboarding events and much of the socializing--would be sharing the stage with the host city.

That put the Park City Mountain Resort on the spot to deliver world-class levels of service and support of its own for the athletes, media, and visitors who would be descending on the resort during the Gam

es.

Kenny Lentz, the resort's IT manager, knew the resort's IT support needed to be top-notch for such an effort. However, prior to the Games, the resort's applications were hardly of Olympic caliber. Instead, the resort relied on a hodgepodge of applications to handle ticketing, rentals, ski passes, food and beverage, and other transactions. Few of these systems were integrated, which made it difficult to process the data and find specific customer information.

To be ready for the Games, which kicked off in February 2002, Park City began revamping its IT infrastructure in the summer of 2000. Starting in November 2001, the resort's customers began using a bar-coded ski pass that validates access within the resort and allows them to charge meals, clothes, and other retail items. After the lifts have closed at the end of the day, the system corrals all the transactions and charges them to the owner's credit card.

Since all customer transaction data now runs through a central database, tracking customer behavior is much easier. The new system precisely accounts for every transaction, decreasing credit card charge backs. "It has just made it easier for customers to do more buying," says Lentz.

Before the upgrade, all food and rental shop transactions were rung up on cash registers at the point of sale that weren't wired into the network. Later, someone had to collect the receipts and enter them into a reporting database manually. Other staffers had to print a copy of all transactions and eventually enter them into the general ledger by hand. "There were a lot of hands in the mix and probably a lot of lost charges," Lentz says.

After reviewing four or five software vendors, Lentz installed ResortPOS version 5 by Resort Technology Partners (RTP). A specialized application for ski resorts, ResortPOS allows a cashier to scan a bar code from a person's ski pass to charge purchases. It also accepts credit cards directly. (See diagram of the complete solution.)

Credit card transaction information, encrypted via SSL, runs over the resort's IP backbone and through Park City's ISP, AT&T, to U.S. Bank, the resort's banker. The transaction is recorded by ResortPOS in a SQL Server 2000 database, allowing employees with access privileges to search transactions or run target lists for marketing campaigns.

Lentz says the new system has proved itself valuable on a number of fronts.

For starters, there is the simple issue of charge backs, a problem faced by every business that accepts credit cards. Often businesses without sophisticated tracking systems can't prove that a customer made a disputed purchase--and they lose the sale as a result. Lentz says that before the RTP system was implemented every transaction had only a hard-copy record. When the credit card company asked for a proof of purchase, someone had to dig through stacks of receipts. "It was really hard to prove that a charge back was illegitimate," he says, "and the bank usually sides with the cardholder."

Now each transaction's detailed information is sent immediately from the POS terminals to a database. A quick search on the database can turn up any desired details. "We've already saved a lot here," he says. "You'd be surprised what charge backs add up to."

This summer RTP plans to write an interface to Park City's Great Plains eEnterprise general ledger application. All the information generated by RTP's application can be sent to eEnterprise immediately to help the company perform real-time budget analysis to see if it is meeting daily or weekly targets, for example.

Since it no longer needs all the data-entry personnel, Park City has also saved on labor and training costs. But more importantly, Park City is seeing increased sales because, with the ResortPOS system, customers can make purchases more easily and the resort has the data it needs to reach out to them more effectively.

"We expect this system to pay [for itself] in hard savings in about three years," he says.

The new system has also ushered in a host of new customer relationship possibilities.

Within the application, for example, a customer manager function creates an accessible database of customer information, including customers' transaction history, where and how often they skied (wireless scanners capture skiers' pass information on each chairlift), what types of skis they rented, which ski instructor taught them, and other information that helps in providing effective customer service.

"It provides such an unbelievable amount of information that customer retention should be so much easier," says Lentz.

If Park City wants to send an e-mail blast to customers who have spent more than $10,000 in one week to tell them about a special promotion, it can now do so with a few clicks of a mouse.

Most of this information runs through the customer manager portion of ResortPOS. But all concession transactions are actually run from a different server hosting a separate application: InfoGenesis Revelation 2.6.1, which tracks food and beverage point-of-sale transactions. RTP has written an integration interface using Microsoft Visual Basic that immediately sends all the InfoGenesis data to RTP and its SQL Server 2000 database once a transaction is closed.

"Soon we hope to integrate everything onto one application running on one server," says Lentz. "We want to move over to a true CRM application."

But it wasn't just the resort's software infrastructure that needed an overhaul for the Games. Updates to its hardware setup were also required to deliver the high level of service visitors to the resort would expect.

The resort's existing infrastructure consisted of a Comptrol software system running under DOS, housed on a 200MHz Hewlett-Packard Netserver LH3. The ticketing system ran on an HP Vectra 486 client, also under DOS. The cash registers were non-computerized models that required hard-copy records management.

For the overhaul, Lentz, acquired Dell PowerEdge 6450 servers to run Resort Technology Partners' ResortPOS application, and a PowerEdge 2550 server to support the InfoGenesis Revelation food and beverage point-of-sale application. He also bought 45 Dell Optiplex GX110 desktops for ticketing, ski school, rentals, and other point-of-sale transactions.

Numerous T1 lines from AT&T, the resort's ISP, feed into a switched Fast Ethernet IP network with a gigabit backbone. HP Procurve 400 and 2400 series switches support the data flow, along with a Cisco 2611 router provided by AT&T. For security, the resort uses a Cisco IOS router-based firewall service managed by AT&T.

To scan ski passes at various lifts throughout the mountain, Park City purchased Symbol Technologies PDT 7246 wireless scanners. The passes' bar-code information gets sent over an 812.11b wireless network and stored in a SQL Server 2000 database.

"We now have the equipment to really get a lot of value from our network," says Lentz, who estimates a positive return on this IT investment in about three years.

Which vertical industries do you think have a good handle on customer relationship management? Which ones need to do a better job? Share your thoughts in TalkBack below.

Hardware
Description	Product	Company
Router	Cisco 2611	Cisco
Client	Optiplex GX110	Dell
Server	PowerEdge 2550	Dell
Server	PowerEdge 6450	Dell
Switch	Procurve 2424	Hewlett-Packard
Switch	Procurve 4000M	Hewlett-Packard
Switch	Procurve 408	Hewlett-Packard
Handheld	PDT 7246	Symbol Technologies

Software
Description	Product	Company
Point-of-sale	Revelation	InfoGenesis
General ledger	Great Plains eEnterprise	Microsoft
Database	SQL Server 2000	Microsoft
App Dev	Visual Basic	Microsoft
Point-of-sale	ResortPOS	Resort Technology Partners

Services
Description	Product	Company
ISP		AT&T