Great service to guests, rewarding careers for team members and high value for owners is only possible when people and processes work effectively and efficiently.

One-day Continuous Improvement Workshop

A LEAN/Continuous Improvement project is no different to any change management process so it is therefore vital that communication to the team is clear and completely transparent from the start to allay any concerns they may have.

A fantastic way to start any LEAN/Continuous Improvement project is with the 1-day Continuous Improvement Workshop.

This highly interactive & practical workshop is the first step to embedding a culture of “Continuous Improvement” in the DNA of your business. Your managers will learn how to use straightforward and highly effective lean tools to simplify everyday processes that will make the job easier for their team and themselves. By identifying this “waste” more time can be spent on more “value-adding activities” to enhance the guest experience, generate more sales, conduct more training etc…

The workshop culminates in a process mapping exercise where learners map real life processes from their own workplace, waste is identified and a new, more efficient process is created through

collaboration with their colleagues.

Each learner will make a “commitment” at the end of the day, they will choose a process challenge in their own workplace where they will use their new continuous improvement skills to optimise. For ongoing project assistance see our support model options below.

Labour Utilisation Analysis

A Labour Utilisation analysis seeks to understand the historical correlation between labour usage and volume which can expose areas of opportunity where a more structured approach to labour

management could have delivered a better result.

Our approach is to use your best available data to provide an opinion on your labour models flexibility in each department by month and by day of the week.

Creating a ratio of payroll cost divided into sales revenue (payroll cost %) gives us a high-level perspective on the payroll cost %, however we view this as a flawed metric because it is so heavily

dependent on revenue.

Payroll cost % fails to inform us of how much time was used to service our customers and if that time was sufficient to deliver a consistently outstanding guest experience. For that we need to use productivity.

We will help you establish baseline productivity metrics that can be used to help HOD’s schedule their labour more effectively and to monitor productivity variances on a daily basis to eliminate the risk of an overuse of labour relative to volume at the end of the month.

LEAN Opportunity Assessment

This is a process observation study conducted by observing one team-member from the start of their shift to the end of the shift and logging all the activities they perform, how often they are repeated and how long they take.

We categorise these activities as ′′productive′′ (value-adding) or an ′′opportunity′′ for improvement (potentially non-value-adding). We perform further analysis of the data collected to further classify and quantify the magnitude of the opportunities that exist.

When conducting these studies, the more team members we observe over more shifts the better, that way we can capture early/late shifts, busy/quiet days, weekdays/weekends etc... We have found that we can get a reasonably good set of data from just 4-8 observations per department.

For example, in the case of a housekeeping department, this could include 4/6 observations of a Room Attendant, 2 observing floor Supervisors and/or Linen Porter shifts.

A week to 10 days after our team leave your property you will receive a comprehensive report detailing our findings. You will also receive our implementation planning tool containing our recommendations. We provide you with guidance on how these

′′opportunities′′ can be converted into productive, value-adding activities or eliminated altogether plus a handy tracker to monitor the implementation.

Ongoing Support Options

Detailed reports, recommendations and an implementation planner are provided at the end of a Lean Opportunity Assessment and learners attending a Continuous Improvement Workshop commit to a project they will undertake in their department.

To ensure the greatest chance of reaching a successful outcome we recommend that we conduct a series of ongoing monthly project/implementation reviews.

We have 3 support models where we help the HOD’s and project teams by providing them with guidance, advice and technical assistance to deliver the implementation plan that they have agreed or to deliver the project that they have chosen. This support can be provided remotely or in-person depending on the level of interaction you require.

Our clients have found that when the HOD’s/Team leaders understand that they have a call to attend each month with an external consultant to review their progress, this provides a degree of implied accountability which can motivate them to achieve a greater level of success by bringing their projects to a fruitful conclusion.

Our three levels of support packages are:

Remote Support

• This includes support via e-mail or phone and a project review zoom call with the HOD/Project team leaders each month.

On-site Support – 1 day per month

• This includes the remote support plus an average of 1 day a month on-site. This day doesn’t need to be consumed each calendar month; if you prefer, you can allocate 2/3 days to be scheduled together for multiple tasks such as providing direct project support to your team, delivering one of our training courses, conducting targeted process observations, facilitating project selection meetings, conducting Kaizen events, conducting labour utilisation analysis, or supporting any bespoke projects you have in mind.



On-site Support – 2 days (or more) per month

• This includes everything listed in the onsite support above but includes an average of 2 (or more) days per month on-site, so more time for conducting additional team training or supporting more complex projects, especially those requiring observations.