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simultaneity and customer contact you experienced with the service in each case. How did these
affect your perception of the quality of the experience?

8 Explain for the benefit of a friend who is not studying the subject, why operations management is
vitally important for any organization.

9 Why has the supply chain network perspective of operations management become more important in
recent years?

10 Draw the supply network for:

a A dairy (producing milk for consumers)
b A motor car manufacturer (producing cars for drivers)
c An oil company (supplying petrol to car drivers)

CASE STUDY EXERCISE Hotel Matina

Hotel Matina is a family owned three star resort hotel located on a Greek holiday island. Although the hotel
is medium sized, having 40 rooms and one suite, managing its operations is still a rather complex business.
The hotel’s operations can be both varied and complex, involving customer, material and information process-
ing. They encompass front office operations, that have direct contact with the hotel’s guests (e.g. reception,
swimming pool, bar services) and back office operations, that take place out of sight of the guests (e.g.
housekeeping, procurement, laundry). However, it is the hotel’s reception and housekeeping departments
that are fundamental to ensuring that the guests are provided with a reliable and quality overnight experience.

The hotel reception

The hotel’s reception is the focal point for the customers; it is their first and major contact point during
their stay at the hotel. It also provides the customers’ last impression of their entire hotel experience.
Reception is involved with reservations, check-in, customer service and check-out. Hence, its location
within the hotel is at the most important and visible entry and exit point of the hotel. Its physical layout aims
to not only convey a warm first impression to the guests, but also to provide enough functional space to
make it convenient and pleasant for guests who are waiting to be served. Whilst background music plays,
arriving guests who have prepared their registration cards online can utilize the express check-in service.
Similarly, departing guests who have checked their bill via their room TV set can use the express check-
out services.
Reception’s main role is to provide guests with personal contact that can satisfy their request for inform-
ation about the hotel and the surrounding area and meet their needs for a range of individual services
such as taxi bookings, Internet connections, restaurant bookings and so on. Given the personal nature of
their encounter with customers, all reception staff are trained to have good communication and presenta-
tion skills. They need to show empathy and demonstrate a desire to serve guests’ needs immediately and
in a pleasant way. The emotional demands on reception staff can be very great, as they need to always
be smiling and to speak to customers in a warm and friendly way, irrespective of their own physical, men-
tal and psychological situation. Being at the focal point of the hotel, reception staff also have an important
role to play in promoting and selling the hotel’s other services, such as the swimming pool, the bar and
the restaurant.
The reception also acts as a communication hub for other hotel employees, since it provides information
about events taking place at the hotel, vacated rooms that are ready to be cleaned, electrical faults reported
by guests that need to be transferred to the maintenance department, and so on.
L

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18 PART ONE INTRODUCTION TO OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

L
The back office
The work of reception is supported by a back office, located in the basement of the hotel. This is respons-
ible for collecting and processing a vast amount of customer information during all stages of the guest cycle,
from initial contact before arrival, during their stay and after their departure. Unlike those at the reception,
back office staff do not need any special knowledge of languages or communication skills. Instead, a great
emphasis is placed on their analytical and computer skills. The major activities in the back office include:
G Reservations: take reservations, check information about room rates and inventory availability, accept
and/or decline reservation, take customer information and details and/or check with the marketing
database to see if customer details already exist, and confirm reservation with the client.
G Room status and allocation: upon arrival guests need to be allocated to a room depending on their
reservation requests (e.g. double bed) and the current status of the hotel’s room stock. The
maintenance of the status of the hotel’s stock of rooms is a process that involves staff from different
departments (e.g. housekeeping, reception, maintenance); its management is crucial since it can
significantly affect guest service and satisfaction. For example, they need to avoid any delays in
providing guests with their required room, whilst ensuring that rooms that are still dirty are not released.
G Billing: all charges that guests incur within the hotel (at the bar, restaurant, room service, etc.) need to
be charged on a daily basis to the guest’s folio. Information on guests’ folios needs to be timely and
accurate in order to avoid any faults (e.g. charging customers for items they have not purchased,
and/or avoiding the loss of any payments). Co-operation and communication with all hotel
departments is required. On the day of departure, the department prints the bill, which is passed to
reception, so that guests can check it and settle their bill.
G Night audit: at the end of every day, all information recorded during the day needs to be checked for
accuracy and reports generated for the next day’s activities. Specifically, the status of all rooms has to
be checked, arrival and departure reports have to be printed and disseminated to reception and
housekeeping.
G Reporting: the back office should be able to provide reports of the hotel performance at any stage that
the hotel manager may require such information (e.g. level of reservations, occupancy rates and
average room rates).

The Hotel Matina has many attractions for customers

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CHAPTER 1 OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT 19

G Guest history: after their departure, guests’ details and any information generated from their activities
(e.g. a request for a second pillow, a specific newspaper, preference for a particular wine) has to be
typed and transferred to the hotel’s marketing database. This information is important in establishing
relations with guests (e.g. posting birthday and Christmas cards) and for personalizing their future
stays. The marketing department is also responsible for accumulating and analyzing such customer
information in order to develop appropriate marketing activities.

Housekeeping
The work of a housekeeper is physically demanding, repetitive, unskilled and of low status. However, it is
equally as important for the provision of an excellent hotel stay as any of the hotel’s other jobs. Moreover,
the scale and complexity of maintaining the cleanliness of the hotel should also be highlighted. Apart from
cleaning bedrooms, housekeeping staff also need to clean the public areas (reception, lobbies, corridors,
etc.). The traffic volume in public areas can be quite large, with more than 200 people walking through these
areas of the hotel on a typical day, sometimes more than once.
Room cleaning is a very standardized process. Check lists are provided to staff, so that they know what
to clean, in what order, and what to check before finishing the maintenance of each room. The hotel house-
keeper makes random controls on a daily basis to ensure that rooms have been prepared to the required
standard. Housekeeping tasks are very suitable for the application of time and motion studies. This has en-
abled, for example, the room cleaning trolley used by housekeeping staff to be designed to carry around
all necessary cleaning and maintenance materials. Similarly, bedroom furniture is fixed to the walls thereby
preventing its re-arrangement by guests, which might slow down floor cleaning. Also, the time needed to
clean a bedroom has been accurately calculated (20 minutes on average). This greatly simplifies the task
of scheduling the work of housekeeping staff each day, as staffing levels and tasks can be based on the
number of guests and reservations.
The cleaning of the public areas is divided into a number of tasks with different frequency and timings,
devised according to their importance and the risk of their becoming dirty. For example, floors are sched-
uled to be cleaned at least three times per day (early morning, afternoon and evening), window cleaning is
planned for every other day, while surfaces are scheduled for cleaning once a day. Curtains are cleaned
once a month to remove wind-blown dust accumulations. Public toilets need regular attention to ensure that
they are clean and re-stocked with toiletries. Consequently, they are normally checked at least three times
per day; more on days when there are large numbers of check-ins and check-outs. A checklist is displayed
prominently in the toilet areas so that guests can see a record of the timing of cleaning and re-stocking that
has taken place.
Overall, the hotel housekeeper maintains a complete schedule of cleaning activities, ranging from day-
to-day cleaning tasks, through regular but less frequent cleaning of particular items, to deep cleaning or
‘seasonal cleaning’. Moreover, the range of different floor surfaces, linen and furniture items in the hotel,
which in turn requires different treatments, detergents and cleaning regimes, serves to demonstrate the
complexity of housekeeping activities. The wrong use of a cleaning material and chemical may have a harm-
ful effect on the item, the person using it and the environment. Chemicals can be dangerous in their use and
so staff also have to comply with any relevant legislation.

—Marianna Sigala

Questions (Suggested answers can be found on the companion website www.thomsonlearning.co.uk/barnes) www.
1 List as many of the operations taking place in the hotel as you can. For each of these identify their
inputs, transformation processes and outputs.
2 Classify each of these operations according to the dominant transformed resource (materials,
customers, information).
3 Which are front office and which are back office operations?
4 What are the main challenges for those managing the hotel’s operations?
5 What types of skills are required by the staff working in each of the hotel’s operations?

Copyright 2008 Cengage Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.