Case Study
Standardising and refining hotel operations.
A blueprint for high quality and consistent hotels.
Becoming the favourite value hotel
One of the UK’s leading hotel chains was making process improvements to its operation following a significant financial restructuring.
Gobeyond Partners was asked to look at ways to improve and standardise the customer experience, where there was a high variation in performance and a lack of standardisation in how their hotels were operating.
We focused on making it as easy as possible for the hotels to provide a high quality and consistent service.
Using some of their leading hotels in London, we ran a three week diagnostic investigating how the various teams were operating, piloting process improvements and then producing a rollout plan for use across the whole organisation.
Greater efficiency for operations
The diagnostic highlighted problems across different departments:
- Reception: Ineffective handovers created 46% of all customer queries, with under-utilised teams idle for 15% of their time
- Housekeeping: £107k annual overspend due to ineffective planning for work allocation
- Food & Beverage: Stock take completed monthly and not linked to the ordering system resulting in excess levels of stock equating to £91k across the leading hotels
- Hotel Managers: Only 15% of their time was spent managing people
Benefits for the whole organisation
After implementing quick wins during the pilot, we created a detailed rollout plan for their largest hotels, which projected:
£637k in benefits p/a
This was achieved through:
- Saving 55k hours per year
- Direct cost savings of £91k
The time saved will be reinvested into value-add activities. For instance, by creating a standard day for Hotel Managers we increased the time they spent on customer interaction, people management and operations management by 14%.
The internal team attended a three day Lean Awareness and Lean Practitioner course run by OEE Consulting to equip them with the relevant knowledge and skills to continue supporting process improvements across the organisation.