Lean Hospitality
Lean Industries Series
Topics
• What is Lean?
• The Hospitality Industry
• Introduction to Lean Hospitality
• Applying Lean to Hospitality
• Benefits of Lean Hospitality
• A Lean Marriot – Case Study
• Summary
What is Lean Thinking?
Value
Empowered
People
Value
Stream
Perfection
Flow &
Pull
The Hospitality Industry
• The hospitality industry consists of companies within the
food services, accommodations, recreation and
entertainment sectors
• The hospitality industry is a several billion dollar industry
that mostly depends on the availability of leisure time
and disposable income
• A hospitality unit such as a restaurant or hotel consists of
multiple groups such as:
▫ Facility maintenance
▫ Direct operations
▫ Management
▫ Marketing
▫ Human resources
Applying Lean to Hospitality
• Lean transformation includes the development and
generation of the service within the hospitality industry
itself, its delivery and management throughout the entire
life cycle
• Focus is given to the transactional process, operating
system, skill and behaviors to sustain the gains
• The lean process should be designed end-to-end, to create
value from the customer’s perspective and keep information
and material flowing rapidly through the system without
interruption and backflow
The Technical Aspect is just 20%
Benefits of Lean Retail
• Rebuild every work process from the customers’
perspective to save labor costs and fund improvements
in customer service
• Make “upstream” improvements and eliminates or
simplifies tasks that are invisible to customers
• Strengthens standard benchmarking approaches with
rigorous performance management tools to compare
operating and financial metrics and achieve
performance improvements
A Lean Marriott
• As a result of applying lean to its operations, in less
than one year the hotel’s service score rose 10
points to 87 and went from the bottom half to the
top 10 percent in its peer group
• The improved operations not only positively impacts
hotel guests, but it also impacts the hotel’s bottom
line through repeat customer stays
Summary
• Change must be seen as a work process, as a
value stream of work that moves a business
organization from a wasteful operating system
to a more lean effective one
• Waste must be eliminated from the change
process