Outrigger Case Study Essay Example for Free

Outrigger Case Study Essay Though the hotel and resorts industry has suffered due to the declining economy over the past several years, Outrigger Hotels and Resorts (â€Å"Outrigger†) has been able to maintain a strong niche market in Hawaii as well as beginning to expand geographically, establishing a stronger international presence. Though they began as major competitors with companies like Marriott, Hilton, and Starwood, Outrigger has been able to diversify its product portfolio mainly through acquisitions to appeal to a wider customer base. Outrigger created OHANA hotels to attract more â€Å"budget travelers† as well as beginning to offer condominiums off the beach front to appeal to regular travelers that vacationed more frequently. In these new markets, Outrigger benefited from no direct competition and is able to benefit from a diversified product portfolio. Outrigger has enjoyed success in these new markets but has faced many problems due to their entrance into these slightly different markets. In spite of Outrigger’s aggressive geographical and product expansion in new markets, it has preferred to maintain a centralized management structure. Along with their centralized management structure Outrigger has tried to develop centralized operations and information systems. Outrigger’s operations and IT infrastructure in Hawaii were highly centralized. Outrigger’s properties in Hawaii all utilized the same Central Reservation Office; however all other properties located outside of Hawaii handled their reservations in house, limiting collection of important customer data and missing out on the opportunity to enjoy significant cross-property traffic. All properties in Hawaii ran on a JD Edwards ERP as the cornerstone of Outrigger’s back office operations while running Stellax, their integrated CRS/PMS, providing revenue management, reservation center support, and enabled data collection for further analysis on their E.piphany software. This integrated IT infrastructure has allowed Outrigger to â€Å"harness the analytical power of E.piphany to do forecasts and generate business intelligence both at the source of business and at guest levels.† Properties outside of Hawaii are not allowed to benefit from integration of IT and information systems since they run on similar but different systems that do not allow for real time electronic interface with other hotel locations and wholesalers of vacations. Outrigger believes that a  centralized IT infrastructure and systems is a source of competitive advantage. However, as the firm has diversified its product portfolio and geographic presence they have been sacrificing the centralization of IT infrastructure and have been unable to harness the potential benefits of integrated systems in their international markets. To remedy this problem of a lack of integration and communication, Outrigger could expand their use of Stellax to its international locations, develop a new PMS/CRS system that better could better handle the different needs of Outriggers’ properties in different markets, or move its information sharing to the cloud for better communication between properties. Expansion of Stellax would benefit Outrigger by enabling consistent data gathering and analysis of important business and customer information that could allow for rewards programs that could increase profitability through cross-property traffic and meeting the needs of the customer better. This expansion of Stellax would be expensive and could create problems due to differences in needs between properties in Hawaii and international properties. Development of a new PMS/CRS platform that would be better suited for the wide variety of needs between different properties, though customization could be achieved through the ap plication of add-on modules that could tailor the new PMS/CRS system to the unique needs of each individual property. This solution could be very complicated and much more expensive then the first alternative due to the degree of customization. In addition, this option could create a more decentralized structure when Outrigger is trying to achieve increased centralization of operations. Lastly, Outrigger could move their information sharing between properties to the cloud. This option is less expensive than the other alternatives but would offer limited benefits. Though properties would be able to share business and customer information, analysis would be limited due to different data gathering techniques and differences between the type of business and customer data that each individual property’s system collected. To enable better integration of properties and to create a more centralized IT and systems infrastructure, Outrigger should develop a new PMS/CRS platform that would meet the needs of their diversified product markets. Though this option is most expensive it offers the most centralized structure and the greatest potential value for  Outrigger. Stellax is very outdated even though it still suits the needs of properties in Hawaii, but not the needs of Outrigger’s international properties. By developing a new customizable PMS/CRS platform, Outrigger would become much more centralized and could create value from its diversified portfolio of projects through the utilization of rewards programs that promote cross-selling of Outrigger properties and harnesses the power of business and customer information that is consistent between Hawaii properties as well as international properties. To track to success of such a large system implementation Outrigger could track the amount of customers that visit multiple Outrigger locations and the success of cross-selling of properties through the tracking of customer’s redeeming rewards points they earned through staying a multiple different Outrigger properties. Implementation of brand new software is risky however if it is properly managed and implemented correctly the rewards could greatly outweigh the cost.

Plant Material Essay -- Plants, Seeds

Plant material The seeds of A. precatorius were collected from the medicinal plant garden of Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dr. H. S. Gour University, Sagar, M.P., India. Seeds were sterilized and germinated by following the protocol described in our previous publication .[15] Initiation of A. precatorius cell cultures Different explants from aseptically germinated seeds viz. leaves, epicotyle and petiole were tested for culture initiation by variation in plant growth regulators (PGR) and Agrobacterium mediated transformation. Non-transformed callus cultures were initiated by placing explants on solidified MS medium supplemented separately with the hormones: 1 mg/l naphthalene acetic acid (NAA); 1 mg/l Kinetin (Kn); 0.5 – 2.0 mg/l 2, 4- dichlorophenoxy acetic acid (2, 4-D) and there combinations (Data not shown). For transformation experiments, leaves were excised from 30 d old in vitro germinated plantlets of A. precatorius. A. tumefaciens strains (MTCC 431, MTCC 609, MTCC 2250 and MTCC 2251) were used to establish transformed callus cultures. These strains were procured from Microbial Type Culture Collection (MTCC), Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), Chandigarh, India. A minimum of 30 explants were used for each experiment. All explants cultured on sterilized petriplates comprising MS medium solidified with 1.0 % agar and supplemented with 30 g/l sucrose. The pH was adjusted to 5.7 Â ± 0.2. The medium was autoclaved under 15 psig pressure at 121Â ºC for 20 min. The explants were co-cultivated with Agrobacterium strains for infection to induce transformed callus. For this purpose, Agrobacterial colonies were cultured for 48 h on solid nutrient agar medium at 28 Â ± 2Â °C. Ten loopful bacteria were then... ... in a maximum synergistic promotion of glycyrrhizin accumulation i.e. 4.9-fold higher compared to transformed control culture. The present study indicates the potential of these biotechnology-based methodologies for large-scale production of glycyrrhizin. Furthermore, in order to develop a process for commercial production of glycyrrhizin by plant cell cultures some additional yield enhancement strategies may be worked out like, optimization of medium composition, environmental condition and addition of precursors. Acknowledgments The authors are thankful to Dr. Ashish Baldi, Department of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India for his valuable and timely assistance. The author VSK wishes to acknowledge All India Council for Technical Education, New Delhi for providing junior research scholarship.

Rudolf diesel

Rudolf Diesel was born on March 18, 1858 in Paris France the second of three children of Elise and Theodor diesel. Diesel spent is early childhood in France but because of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 his family was forced to leave and moved to London. At 12 years old his parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle because they wanted him to attend royal country trade school where his uncle was a math teacher and to become fluent in German. At age 14 he wrote a letter to his parents saying how he wanted to be an engineer after finishing his education at top f his class, and then he enrolled at the new industrial school of Augsburg.Two years later he received a merit scholarship to attend the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic of Munich which he accepted instead of listening to his parents and starting work. Diesel could not graduate in July 1879 because he fell ill to typhoid (a bacterial disease resulting from ingestion of food or water exposed to feces). While he was waiting to tak e his exam he got engineering experience at sluzer bros machine works. After graduating in 1880 diesel went to work for his college professor Carl Von Linde o develop a refrigeration and ice factory, and became the director of the plant one year later.In 1890 he moved to Berlin where he started working toward better fuel economy for steam engines, he tried using ammonia vapor to gain his desired fuel economy but the engine blew up during testing. Later he tried to increase fuel economy by using the Carnot cycle which led him to his own theory of compression ignition engines, in these engines the fuel was not put into the cylinder until the end of the compression stroke and the fuel was ignited by the high temperatures from ompression.He obtained multiple patents for his design in the United States and Europe. After boarding a boat in 1913 to attend a meeting he was missing when the boat docked. A couple days later they found his body in the ocean but let the body back to sea after g etting his id card and other things he was carrying. I think he was murdered because Hubert akroyd Stuart had put out a patent a couple years before diesel for a compression ignition engine but was told that diesels was slightly different so it was 0k. This is a clear motive for revenge!!

The Ethics And Ethics Of Abortion - 1496 Words

THE ETHICS AGAISNT ABORTION Abortion has been one of the most debated social and political topics since it was made legal in South Africa. Through the application of different philosophical arguments this paper will showcase in detail if abortion is either immoral or permissible using ethical underpinnings (cite 2). In this essay abortion will be defined as the deliberate removal of a fetus from the womb of a human female through the request of the mother resulting in the death of the fetus. Abortions are thus voluntary actions of removing a human fetus. In the South African context where hospitals and clinics are performing between 2000 and 3000 abortions every month, this reveals a worrying trend. What exacerbates this trend is the data†¦show more content†¦The greatest controversy with determining if abortion is permissible or not is one of defining if whether the fetus is a human being or not. In a genetic sense a human being is defined as the member of biological species, homo species which inclu des fetuses and humans without functioning brains. In the moral sense a human being is defined as a fully-fledged member of the moral community, consisting of all and only persons. Moral humanity overrides the genetic humanity in that there are five characteristics that entitle an entity to be considered a person: consciousness and in particular the capacity to feel pain; reasoning; self-motivated activity; capacity to communicate; and the presence of self-concept and self-awareness [The ethics of abortion, (2015)]. Warren (1973) argues that if any ‘being’ does not possess most of these characteristics it is then rendered not a human being in the moral sense, thus assuming that there is no stage during fetal development at which a fetus resembles a person enough to have a significant right to life [The ethics of abortion, (2015)]. A counter-argument to the above school of thought points out that if killing the fetus is permissible because they are not ‘full-fledge d’ members of the moral community, by the same standards it would be permissible or justifiable to kill new-borns as they have not entailed these five characteristics of ‘personhood’ and depend fully on an adult individual to survive and cannot survive on its own.