Article from Hospitality Technology, Mar/Apr, 2000
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Stromberg LLC (Lake Mary, FL) has also embraced the Internet as a more cost-efficient means of bringing together software, data from multiple locations and people who may be at those locations or travelling. Its Time Manager product was released in a Web edition last June, intended for organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees. Now the company is providing an Enterprise edition for larger organizations, including white-collar employees, with Web access for them to the appropriate level of data, including a kiosk module which was released last fall.

"Our hospitality clients are looking for more robust ways to control labor costs," says Gary Plotnik, Stromberg's vice president of business development. "They want to get reports in a usable form, but they have very limited IT resources." For them, Stromberg and its competitors are finding that the Internet-based approach is far more cost-efficient.

Martin Hollis, head of research and development at Stromberg, provides a peek at what may be offered soon — an even more flexible and detailed kind of reporting, using a "pivot table" functionality in spreadsheet software. Every piece of data can be related to any other, "like a Rubic's cube," he says.

The drive to continually enhance product offerings comes from the market, says Stromberg President Ted Dinkel. One leading customer is nearby Universal Studios, whose entertainment-hospitality complex employs a very diverse workforce of 12,000. As it has stretched to satisfy growing clients, the company can now offer solutions costing from $299 to $1 million. "This marketplace is starting to take off," he says.