New to Six Sigma and The Industry

Bobby,Are we going back to advertising?

Just answering questions Stan.

DLW’s advice is good and just ignore that Robert S – he is just trying
to sell you something that has nothing to do with the question you
asked.I wonder how you are in this role in a new industry to you and not
getting any advice from leadership. I would ask them why they see a
need for this role. If they don’t know the answer, I would run like hell.

Being a Supply Chain/ SS Consultant and traveling a great deal, I have several Suggestions for you. Guests are not enchouraged to be frugel in Hotel Rooms but Hotels do not provide incentives either.
If you put TV remotes with Sleep timers in all rooms, I would not keep the TV on all night after I fell asleep, saving Electricity.
 Also putting a light kill switch by the bed would make it eaasier for me to turn the lights off at night, vs leaving one or two on because I can’t find the switch or don’t want to get up to turn it off (This is more common in Europe and Asia than the US).
Also toiletries in hotel rooms seem to me to be a big cost savings opportunity. Liquid soap dispensers on the wall for Shampoo and Shower rinse instead of small disposable bottels would be a good thing. If you can’t convince the Senior Management to go along with this offer guests a free bottle of Water or Can of Soda if they will agree to not have the room restocked with 6-8 items each day such as soap, razors, shampoo ect. In Asia this extends to Duvet covers and Bath mats as well.
Use reusable Laundry Bags instead of plastic disposable bags. Let guests go online to fill out Laundry forms vs the expensive 3 part forms used.
Put pencils (like golf pencils) instead of pens in hotel rooms, guests are less likely to take them home.
In short follow around a maid for 1 day and look at all of the items she replaces in a hotlel room, and figuer out a way to get guests to want to use less or to make the delivery less expesive and more efficent. When your done there, go to the Kitchen and start all over!
 
Good luek

I am not in the industry but was in Food and Beverage for many, many years.  You need to find out what mistakes you are making now.  Track customer complaints and the things that bother your customers.  If possible, speak to bell hops and valet people.  Chances are, those people hear it directly from the customers.  A best guess would be to stream line your check in service and make sure customers know where to park when checking in.  That is always a concern for me when I check in.
Hope this helps
Nancy

All great suggestions thus far, may also be worth sitting down with whoever is familiar with the hotel budget and see where some of the largest spends are occuring, next determine the processes that generate the outputs causing those expenses, and then look for improvement opps in those processes. 
One improvement specifically for hotels is the reusing towels notes that are placed in bathrooms. 
Hope this helps!

Hi Boom-Boom,
In order to make an improvement you need to know where you are starting from (benchmark).  How many rooms do you have available to sell on any given day (look at records going back 6 months to a year and try to find a trend). If you have lots of rooms available, either sales needs to bring in more conventions/parties, or you need to think about running specials. That would definitely have a financial impact. If your room occupancy is good, or close to capacity all the time, then look at other departments, and do the same thing (restaurant, room service, meeting rooms, all the same applies). The point is that you have to know where you are starting from, and decide if you are where you need to be in comparison to others in your industry. So, if you have 100 rooms available on a Wednesday  – how does that stack up against the other 3 hotels in your area?  You can then decide if that is “normal” or if you can take some competitive advantage by offering something the others don’t. Or you can decide that normal is ok for you, and you can move on to something else. I do it by a process of elimination, one idea/process at a time, until I find what would make the most financial impact. In my experience there are always tons of things that can be improved upon, so almost nothing you improve will be wrong. You just need to find what process is the “most” broken and start there.  Doing something more efficiently than what is currently being done has lots of financial impact beyond “hard” savings. Sometimes there are “soft” savings (like freeing up someone to do something else instead of doing re-work).
Lastly, looking at customer feedback is important too. If there is a trend in complaints, for sure look at that/those issue(s) and see if that would cause a guest to not return to the hotel. Sometimes just making something easier for a guest will make them more likely to return (like faster check-out, or a 24-hour concierge). You will get a lot of good information from that feedback. Pick the top 3 complaints and see if a process needs to be changed, or something added or taken away, and decide if these are important enough to make a financial impact (usually the answer is yes).
I hope that helps…