NEWS ANALYSIS: Using a mobile application to streamline hotel housekeeping tasks may not seem obvious, but it delivers big gains in efficiency and dramatically lowers operational costs.
I was sitting next to Catherine Blieka, product and client services manager for Optii Solutions as we watched Donna Gallyon schedule the housekeeping staff for the day.Gallyon, who is operations manager for the Rocky Gap Casino and Resort in Cumberland, Maryland, was discussing those assignments with housekeeping supervisor Becky Bunnell, as she made a few clicks on the green and orange blocks on her computer screen. Then she was done.“Normally I spend about 20 minutes setting up the housekeeping staff,” Gallyon said. On this day it had taken a little longer because she was explaining what she was doing to an eWEEK columnist who was watching her every move. Once Gallyon was finished assigning housekeepers, she assigned the supervisors, one of whom was Bunnell. Then she was done.Lest you think that assigning the housekeeping staff to its daily rounds is a trivial task, it’s worth noting that housekeeping is about 90 percent of a hotel’s overall operational costs. Any improvement in housekeeping efficiency directly improves the hotel’s bottom line. By using Optii Keeper, the hotel has cut housekeeping costs by about 25 percent, according to general manager Skylar Dice. Optii Keeper is a set of applications created by Optii Solutions that link together the scheduling program on a Windows computer in the office with Apple iPod Touch handheld devices and iPads. The iPods run a dedicated application that the staff can’t change and those devices are controlled by IBM’s MaasS360 secure mobile management system. The hotel’s IT department has an iPod for each employee in the housekeeping department, plus some spares. Next we went to the morning meeting of the housekeeping staff, where trainers read a list of a few items that had cropped up consistently in the previous day’s inspections, which included things such as making sure that trash cans in the rooms were positioned properly, and that windows were cleaned properly. The trainers also read off a list of things that the staff was doing consistently well when the rooms were inspected.It turns out that the same Optii Keeper software that Gallyon was using to schedule the staff is also used by inspectors when they check to see if hotel rooms are cleaned and prepared properly. Later when I followed housekeeping supervisor Bunnell around, she was using the same software that Gallyon had been using, just with a different set of functions.The way Optii Keeper works is by sending each member of the housekeeping staff a personalized schedule and task list to their iPod. Initially the tasks are arranged in the order that staff members would followed as they worked their down the halls in their sections of the hotel.But task priorities listed on the device can changes as needed. For example, the housekeeper might start by cleaning rooms that were being vacated that day first so that newly arriving guests will have a place to stay when they get there.Once the rooms of departed guests are cleaned then the housekeepers move on to clean rooms of people staying another night.
- eWeek