Problem:

Empty rooms in a facility mean no revenue. The Operations team needed knowledge immediately and consistently to help improve their turnaround times. Their biggest question was what are the delays in turning over a room? We helped to ask other ones… how would the team know if there has been an improvement when changes are made? Was there a way to improve communication between the different owners of each step of the process? What is the difference between 5 days and 5 business days?

Roadblocks:

• The room turnover application hadn’t been upgraded in 8-years

• Application set up purely for production use, without any thought towards analysis

• No unique key to track a room’s flow through the 8 steps to turnover

• No room turnover lifecycle methodology, allowing room turnover to start and/or end at any given step

• Baseline created by Operations team took so long and had so many gaps in room lifecycles, that it could not be replicated consistently to know whether changes were actually helping

• Brand new application was not an option for at least a year

Solution:

Within one month, the Operations team had information at their fingertips. A rebuilt process flow, focusing on data management and interactive dashboards, allowed questions to be asked and answered of the data, without the need to change the archaic application.

Data Management:

• Nightly integration into a data warehouse

• Create a room turnover lifecycle methodology, which focused on two items:

  • Each instance of the lifecycle had a consistent Start Step and End Step

  • Steps within an instance of the lifecycle were easily grouped together

• Morning Email Notifications prepping the team for what rooms are currently in-process

• Real-time integration for text notifications, allowing step owners to be notified immediately when it is their turn in the process

Interactive Dashboards:

• Individual Step-chart, with feedback form - Used in team meetings, the Operations team could assign a cause to why a step missed its target time. This feedback could then be analyzed later to see what opportunities are available to resolve missed target reasons.

• Room Turnover trend charts - How many rooms had been turned over and what percentage of those rooms fell into the 5-day turnaround? Had there been improvements from month-to-month in these turnovers at the different steps?

• We also wanted the director to understand what the turnaround looked like when only factoring in “work” hours vs. all hours. This last piece allowed the team to understand that 5 days was not supposed to be 5 business days. And the possibility of having a second shift or a weekend shift could drastically improve the turnaround of these rooms.