Cruise Ship – Hotel Operations
Who says you can’t do Lean on the “High Seas”. This was a piece of work we supported to establish a home grown team of Lean experts, who could go out and challenge any service providing process connected with the world of “Hotel Operations”. The focus being on both Front and Back of house operations.
Lopaz supported a major cruise ship company based in the UK with an initiative to improve the Customer journey and reduce operating costs using Lean as part of a transformation programme. All Lean training was carried out on board ship, this was then followed by an intensive process study phase, and using “Value Stream Mappings” applied to front and back of house operations on board ship, using the internal team coached by Lopaz.
Whilst carrying out a “Lean Learning Academy” we also engaged the crew as part of the improvement exercises. This involved developing and delivering a Lean training syllabus for a 16 strong internal team, selected to support the subsequent process studies. Once this was completed we then engaged the teams with the crew to cover an extensive programme of Mapping, identifying hundreds of opportunities for each ship studied. When back on land these opportunities were analysed to identify which would merit further investigation on other ships in the fleet to eventually provide a business case for change across the fleet in the “Ways of Working”.
Significant opportunities were identified with the team for improvement, including quick wins for local operational issues, as well as transformational opportunities that looked at the bigger picture for the customer journey including embarkation / disembarkation and cabin changeover.
All outputs in the form of “Standard A3” reports, were then reviewed and “Future State” maps produced, leading to business case preparation and preferred solutions following reviews with the senior management team and key stakeholders.
The team that completed this went on to further challenge the “Ways of Working” on board other ships, having created a “benchmark” to enable a standard process to be used for the fleet.