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In a new
effort to raise service level, some hotels are discreetly
monitoring what customers do during their stay and recording it in
shared computer systems, according to a recent article by Wall
Street Journal Online.
“Capturing”
is a new way for the hotel industry to collect customer data for
service personalization. For example, the hotel may use the data
from this opt-in activity to stock the customer’s favorite
beverage in the in-room refrigerator before her arrival.
Delivery of
such unexpected quality in service or product, as we call it
‘exciting quality’ in QFD, could certainly catch the customer’s
attention. But for it to be effective, the baseline ‘expected
quality’ must be fulfilled. This means rooms cleaned promptly,
bathroom restocked, laundry returned on time, and so forth – the
tasks that are typically performed by the hotel’s housekeeping.
One luxury
hotel chain was insightful enough to realize this basic hotel
service presented an opportunity for building stronger customer
loyalty, a better bottom line, and competitiveness, creating an
industry-wide paradigm shift. It was also one of the early
examples of service QFD applications:
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In 1992,
the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company set a company-wide Quality Goal
of:
1) Six
Sigma;
2) 50%
Cycle Time Reduction; and
3) 100%
Customer Retention by 1996.
Toward
this goal, each of the group’s hotels elected to champion a
one-year research study on one of the critical processes that
had been identified as vital to customers’ decision to
continue patronage at their 30 properties worldwide. The
Ritz-Carlton Dearborn in Michigan took on the process for “a
clean, fresh, fully stocked guest room,” a process that could
deliver better, faster, and cheaper housekeeping services
within greater reliability.
A cross-functional team was formed comprised of Ladies and
Gentlemen from Housekeeping, Laundry, Engineering, and Total
Quality Management, with a goal of reducing cycle time by 50%
and creating an error-proof, reliable process, which could be
standardized company-wide for better customer satisfaction.
The team’s first step was to make the existing process visible
and establish baseline practice. Using both macro- and micro
follow charts, the team members observed room cleaning and
collected over 30 random samples which allowed them to
identify the patterns of workflow, distance traveled in
cleaning a gust room, average number of defects per room, item
usage, and cycle times per task.
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This process modeling QFD activity helped the team better
understand crucial customer-supplier relationships. For
example, they developed an unanticipated awareness that
Housekeeping was Laundry’s primary customer even though it was
easy for them to see Laundry as a major supplier to
Housekeeping. The discovery was an important lesson because
insufficient supply of linen and towels was a company-wide
defect. Data indicated each room attendant wasted 30 to 45
minutes daily in tracking down needed supplies. Practices
ranged from walking to the Laundry department from the guest
floors to learn product availability to hoarding supplies to
taking supplies from co-workers’ carts or linen closets.
The team also
found that distribution of guest room supplies
such as towels and linen to honor bar items and paper products
was unreliable, resulting in mistakes, rework, breakdowns in
process inefficiencies, variation, and discrepancies for honor
bar billing. Waste due to this included lost labor dollars,
wasted effort and travel, redundant work, and lost business.
The Cost of Quality was calculated to exceed $460,000 annually
for the entire Housekeeping system.
Because this study was conducted before Modern QFD was
developed, this team resorted to building a House of Quality (HOQ)
matrix in order to align customer requirements with supplier
measures and to identify customer requirements.
We might point out that in today’s Modern QFD, this same
analysis could be done using more agile and easier-to-use
tools such as the Maximum Value Table and without building a
HOQ.
The Ritz-Carlton team then used brainstorming and benchmarking
to develop process options and conducted pilot processes to
test and fine-tune the selected alternative process. Their
process improvement resulted in:
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Reduction in room cleaning cycle time to 65% or 8
minutes with the added task of servicing the honor bar;
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Reduction in defects per room by 42% to 3.7 which
translates to a higher reliability in cleanliness factor;
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Reduction of standard guest room interruptions by 33%
due to combining of honor bar task with cleaning team;
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Reduction in time guest would be disturbed if occupying
room at time cleaning is provided;
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Increase in property/life safety for gusts and staff due
to fewer guest room doors being opened at any one time, as
well as presence of more than one room attendant within a
room;
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Increase in productivity from 13 to 15 rooms per person
and still increasing with resultant labor savings; and
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Reduction in individual travel by 64% to 205 feet within
guest room.
The team also reported intangible benefits such as reduction
in loneliness and monotony, increased job enrichment and
teamwork, better communication between team members and
between guests and team members, and stronger
customer-supplier relationship between Housekeeping and
Laundry.
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