Beth Stackpole

Maytag Corp. has through the decades built a reputation for dependability, partly from building a long line of quality household appliances and partly from the image of the lonely Maytag repairman, the advertising icon who’s on call to fix a product that never breaks. But the $4.3 billion giant didn’t have the same success delivering […]

Fred LeFranc, CEO of LT Acquisition Corp., faced the task of turning around Louise’s Trattorria after buying the bankrupt restaurant chain in late 1997. (See Part 1.) Shortly thereafter he encountered Gazelle Systems at a trade show and was impressed with the company’s data mining tools. Since 85 percent of Louise’s business was done via […]

Louise’s Trattoria was hardly the place to be seen in the late 1990s. The Los Angeles-based restaurant chain, which served up low-priced, traditional Italian fare, was bankrupt and losing sales at a rate of 10 percent a year, with few repeat customers. Fast forward three years, and a lot has changed. A revamped Louise’s is […]

(For small and mid-size businesses, choosing the right ISP has become more complicated amid all the hype, and now, hysteria over market consolidation. Today, in Part II, a look at the criteria companies should consider when selecting an ISP.) Rather than basing decisions purely on price, companies should factor a number of other criteria into […]

Less than a year ago, Brent Ruggles, IT manager at Snow Engineering & Corp. (SE Group), had no worries about the various high-speed internet service providers (ISPs) the company’s six U.S. and two international offices use. Because many of SE Group’s offices are in rural locations, the company, a ski industry consultancy, has to rely […]

Senior VP of information technology Kelly Walls likes the time-saving benefits of unified messaging. Like many suburbanites, Kelly Walls used to dread his commute, a 40-minute nightmare that lay between his home and the sprawling city of Atlanta. But all that has changed thanks to the help of a unified messaging product that lets him […]

Yusef Akyuz, vice president of information services at Timberland Co. In the age of real-time commerce, Timberland Co. is just one of many firms in a foot race to satiate customers’ increasing demand for specialized goods delivered faster and more cheaply than through traditional channels. These requirements are forcing companies in all industries to broaden […]

Carlson Wagonlit Travel has loads of expertise in routing corporate passengers between destinations efficiently and economically. But the $11 billion travel management company needed help when it came to directing data from myriad sources into a data warehouse. That’s why Carlson Wagonlit Travel took flight with Informatica Corp.’s PowerCenter, a hub system for integrating enterprise […]

In this article: AT A GLANCE: Sunburst Hospitality Corp. Who’s Hosting What? Chuck Warczak, VP of finance and systems at Sunburst Hospitality Corp., cheerfully avoids the implementation insomnia he experienced in the past. Photo: Martin Simon/SABA Chuck Warczak is no stranger to the sleepless nights that accompany an ERP rollout. At Choice Hotels International, of […]

Cultivating partnerships is nothing new for Hewitt Associates LLC, a $1 billion company that makes its living running the human resources and benefits operations of its customers. Much like the company prioritizes relationship building with its outsourcing clients, Hewitt expects nothing less than the same hands-on treatment when it pairs up with data warehousing vendors. […]