Let us begin our journey. The first thing is to look for our destination and the course1 we will take. Our destination is the company’s permanent sustainability. The compass that keeps us on course is what I call the Operations puzzle. Without that, we shall make way haphazardly and without using what I reckon is the lean war cry: “avanti, avanti”.2
Starting Point
One of the owners of Artemis, a medium-sized Family hotel company, told me: “SPDM has given me a blueprint that lets me see what I am not doing and the impact that has on what I am doing. It is a great help to be able to ask hotel managers accurately and understand where the problem arises. I have found that we have a problem in maintaining my family’s “essence”. We have six hotels with one owner, but not a group of six hotels.”
Getting six hotels to have the same essence, when they had different locations and hotel rankings, made working with basic SPDM concepts obligatory: essence, service dream, Promise and flame red.
Each of Artemis’s hotel managers had left their mark with the help of a Family member. The Family had been involved in each hotel’s day-to-day running and that enabled transmitting part of the essence. Priorities were spotted and decisions taken as this daily relationship went along. The Family wanted to prepare a legacy for the next generation and was thus immersed in “professionalizing” the service’s operational management. The grandparents’ original essence seemed to be slipping away. Translating it here and now showed up disparities that could lead to a loss in Artemis’s differential. Members that had been with Artemis for more than ten years felt the essence emotionally, but it was not rationally spelled out. It had been transmitted by word of mouth and that is very subjective.
After undertaking a study with the proprietors, the Family’s essence was spotted as, “At everybody else’s service.” The Family wanted a service based on Family ties and a personal invitation to each client, as if they were guests at the Family home itself.
The work done to rationalize and spot the service essence was translated as “The Artemis Family invites you.” The Family wanted to transmit their essence whether it was to a three-, four- or five-star hotel. For that, they had to break down the essence into five commandments:
- 1.
The people serving you are happy and guests feel positive energy when interacting.
- 2.
The manager and managing team are the hosts.
- 3.
The surroundings breathe harmony, relaxation and comfort.
- 4.
- 5.
Developing “the art of caring for and serving others” by conveying personally our pleasure to serve and making the experience in an Artemis establishment unique, gratifying and inspirational.
Spotting the essence also made the Family define their service dream. The latter materialized as, “When clients go home, they dream of coming back to our hotels.”
And what was the mainstay in supporting this essence? After a good many discussions,3 it was understood that the mainstay (the company’s flame red) was the hotel managers. They constituted the essence’s watchdogs, an extension of the Family that had to commune with that essence to transfer it to everybody at the moments of truth (MT) when interacting with clients. But by giving each manager a free hand? Obviously not. More detail was needed.
That came hand in hand with defining the Promise. The Family and the CEO defined the Promise as “Faithfully providing clients with what they chose our hotel for.” As there were six hotels, each with its special features, translating the Promise was indispensable. Each tourist category hotel would specify its own services portfolio, but Promise and essence would be left alone.
The organization had to be given clear guidelines, which would snowball to enable action and prioritization
4 in keeping with wishes as expressed. To that end the Promise was broken down into its dimensions, which were evaluated
5 in order of priority.
6 They had to be translated into reality to deliver a clear mandate for action (Table
1.1).
Table 1.1Artemis’s Promise and evaluated dimensions
We see that the most important dimension is range of service provision (4/10). This translates into personalized treatment, friendly treatment to clients, a customer journey with sensations and food and beverage (F&B) with above-average raw material as a starting point.
The two following dimensions with the highest score are service reliability and new ideas for service provision (both 2/10). Spotting new opportunities for service provision (clients’ so-called latent demands) must be done while providing the service itself.
Although lean decision-making was given a low score by the Family, the group spotted it as a very important problem due to its impact on their workaday lives. Sluggishness hindered many service provision activities, and the group figured that that should be streamlined. That led to measures to tackle that inefficiency.
Just by looking at the highest-scoring dimension (service provision), it may be clearly seen that two essential jobs needed to be done: first, specifying the “whole customer journey” from which critical interaction points could be discerned in order to standardize, harmonize and industrialize; second, unlocking directors’ capacity7 to focus them on minding essence and service provision. Unlocking capacity that way also allowed all other dimensions to be fulfilled better. Transforming directors into service watchdogs meant that they spent time on taking action over reliability and improvement as new ideas for daily services.8
In work sessions held with the hotel managers, actions were pored over that could be taken to boost implementing these priorities and to smash blocking factors that prevented them from happening.9 As a priority, Artemis worked hard to tackle unlocking managers’ capacity, as well as the customer journey.
Noteworthy efforts were made to materialize essence and transmit it to every hotel employee. To that end, a questionnaire was designed and filled in personally by everybody that had worked at Artemis for more than ten years. The questionnaire analyzed how the Family addressed each of those surveyed, how they interrelated with clients, what service details the Family stressed most, the details of physical appearance they found most important,10 the personal interface behavior the Family had with clients and employees, or how they behaved in conflictive situations. The questionnaire wanted to spot critical elements materialized from the essence to then be reflected in the welcome pack that was handed11 out annually.
The questionnaires’ results were tabulated and shared in a session with all the hotel managers, who commented and voiced their opinions. It was decided that the Family essence must be conveyed to all the Operations manuals that were being revamped and had to become an integral part of training courses at Artemis. By the same token, developing apps was mooted to enable implementation, and the daily use of manuals using portable devices. Every worker had to have access to the essence’s definition as well as to how the Promise was clarified and evaluated. One element was missing in order to translate the essence: behavior rules for the operational culture. The latter had to be based on the above-mentioned five commandments and the Family’s service values. The same group was asked again what values had been transmitted to them in their work during Artemis’s 50-year life. They were found to be honesty and transparency; diligence; taking responsibility; effort; loyalty and daring. Table
1.2 articulates them with a description of how they are understood at Artemis.
Table 1.2Scores in Artemis’s service
Macro performance rules f...
