At the Sheraton Waikiki, Jeff Gionet, the hotel telecommunications manager, has been nurturing his baby: the Espresso! quality management solution from Management Technologies Inc. Gionet, who has been at the 1,790-room resort hotel, located on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, for 11 years, has watched this system grow and develop over the eight years since its installation, and has proudly supervised it's progress.

The Sheraton Waikiki began looking for a solution that would counteract the growing tendency of the housekeeping staff to ignore maintenance problems they found in the rooms, such as torn carpet and clogged sinks. But the housekeeping staff, who was required to report such problems to the front desk for repairs, simply didn't have the time to wait on hold as the hotel's three front desk clerks answered the nine incoming lines which were inundated by calls from guests and hotel staff. Says Gionet, "We were educating our housekeepers not to report things.

We expected them to make their beds in two minutes, then we kept them on hold for two minutes. They didn't report things out of self preservation; they just didn't have time to wait on the phone." As a result, adds Gionet, the hotel was losing a vital housekeeper function: the only people that were in all the guest rooms every day were not reporting problems, so the hotel couldn't correct the problems before the guest got to the room. And, since the front desk clerks were taking maintenance calls from housekeeping, they were not always available for the guests.

But when Sheraton Waikiki went looking for a solution to their maintenance woes, they didn't find one immediately. It wasn't until one of Gionet's co-workers went to HITEC, a hospitality technology tradeshow sponsored by the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals, that the hotel found the solution they were looking for from Management Technologies.

Laying the groundwork

The solution that Management Technologies provides is called Espresso!, the core of which is called Rapid Response, a quality management system which automates the process for reporting room deficiencies and distributing maintenance calls to hotel staff.

Rapid Response utilizes guestroom phones, a voice computer and a personal computer, which acts as a network or command center. Housekeepers call in deficiencies from the guest room by speed dialing the voice system and punching in deficiency codes on the keypad. The system than dispatches the call to the appropriate worker by following dispatch rules, which can include shift schedules, building assignments and trade groups.

Depending on the priority of the codes entered, the system faxes, pages or prints a work order for the maintenance team to respond to. When a deficiency is corrected, the maintenance staff calls back into the system with the work order number to update the ticket or indicate that a task has been completed. Completed tasks are removed from the active database and stored on a server for reporting purposes. As a result, the staff is more customer-focused, response times to maintenance problems is improved and maintenance teams have greater accountability for their assignments.

In 1996, Sheraton Waikiki purchased Espresso! and began the process of building up the database of trade codes, deficiency codes and dispatch rules that they needed to utilize the product at their property. "The software is a shell," says Gionet, "but it's very easy to configure. You don't have to be a programmer to utilize the product, you just have to have an understanding of what its capabilities are." And once the initial work is done, which Gionet says took Sheraton Waikiki between three to six months, the application rarely needs updating, unless the property chooses to add more deficiencies and trade groups.

Gionet first used Espresso! For communications between the housekeeping and maintenance staff only, giving housekeepers the option to use the system to report problems in the room, but not forcing them to adopt the new technology. "Initially, about 10 to 20 percent of the girls started to use Rapid Response, which was really kind of low. But repair people started visiting those housekeepers' rooms very quickly. And then the housekeeper to the north and housekeeper to the south started wondering why their co-workers were getting such a fast response to maintenance calls, and they wanted to learn the product to gain those benefits, too."

After being introduced to the system, which always picks up, never puts employees on hold and only takes about eight to 10 seconds to process one or many deficiencies, the housekeeping staff quickly warmed to the new solution. "We had nine lines of incoming calls which were once all red," says Gionet. "But within six to nine months of installing Espresso!, we never had more than two or three lines busy at one time. We estimated that we saved over 150 thousand calls to our room control clerks within the first year. And now, it's even higher than that." In addition to saving housekeepers time, other personnel at the hotel benefited from the system.

"Our room control clerks loved it because it gave them more time for guest calls. They didn't have to rush the guest off the phone because they had three other calls waiting, so guest calls were less transactional and guest service improved. And the repair people benefited as well, because the system dispatches directly to the responsible maintenance person. It follows location rules and finds not only the trade that is responsible, but also the person in the trade who is responsible for that particular area," says Gionet.

The system also increases staff accountability to the deficiencies that they are assigned. Sheraton Waikiki includes in their dispatch rules a set of escalation rules that send paged reminders to maintenance staff and also pages supervisors and upper level management when tasks aren't completed. In addition, because all reported deficiencies are tracked electronically, tickets can't be lost, and if a ticket is falsely completed, the system can identify the discrepency through reports when the deficiency is re-reported. And although Gionet reports that the engineering staff showed an initial resistance to the system and the added accountability, he says that about 90 percent of the staff now realize the benefit it offers. "Once the engineers began to understand that we weren't going to hit them over the head with it and that the system would target those who were slacking, they were much more receptive."

Growing into a solution

After the initial success of the product, Sheraton Waikiki began to explore other areas that the application could help streamline. Over time, Gionet added several tasks to Espresso!, including room service tray pickup and pest control. They rolled the product out to their kitchens, outlets, bell staff, front desk and PBX staff as well, adding deficiencies, dispatch rules and trades to the database as needed, educating newly added trade groups and equipping all the necessary hotel staff with pagers to respond to calls. "Pretty soon," says Gionet, "we had the whole hotel on it. It's so much a part of our culture now that if it goes down for maintenance, people start yelling. It was nice to grow into it."

The most recent improvement to the Sheraton Waikiki's use of the Espresso! system is the product integration to their Geac property management system (PMS), which has helped streamline guest services and reduce housekeeper labor. Gionet offers the example of dropping off and removing rollaway beds from guest rooms.

Prior to the PMS interface, the hotel had to run reports pulling all the rooms that had rollaway codes attached to make sure beds got to the correct rooms. The report they ran from Geac was complicated and difficult to read, because the PMS had over 18 codes that indicated roll away requests, resulting in several reports. Additionally, when a guest checked out, housekeepers had to call a bed removal code into the Espresso! system.

Now, that entire process is automated. Espresso! Interfaces with the PMS and pulls all the rollaway requests into one report, automatically paging the appropriate staff at check-in or at guest arrival to have the bed delivered. Espresso! also tracks the check-out date, paging the appropriate staff to have the beds removed. Says Gionet, "The PMS interface is saving us input of about 300 work tickets a day that are now generated automatically. And the nice thing is, it's doing it without error."

Espresso!, which has Rapid Response as its core, also includes several other applications which the Sheraton Waikiki is taking advantage of, including a preventative maintenance module, the Enterprise module and the Inspector module.

A complete package

Espresso! Preventative Maintenance is a product that helps organize the maintenance cycles of a property. According to Gionet, the Sheraton Waikiki has thousands of preventative maintenance items that have to be performed in a 52-week schedule. Espresso! Preventative Maintenance schedules all the items so that they print out, with the appropriate checklists, at the appropriate times. In addition, the application allows you to attach any kind of document to the work order, so instructions, schematics, equipment history and checklists can be attached and printed for the use of the staff, aiding in training, efficiency and thoroughness.

Enterprise is a tool that combines data from multiple properties for comparisons and reporting. Gionet, who installed the Espresso! products at four other locations after completing the installation at the Sheraton Waikiki, says, "We now have a tool to compare the trades against each other. We can see why it takes electricians at one property an hour to complete a task while it takes electricians at another property two hours to complete the same task. It brings an added dimension and greater perspective, so you can start drilling down to what causes differences in labor."

And the newest product to the Sheraton Waikiki is Inspector, an application run on a handheld device that is used to rate cleanliness and perform room inspections which can target problem areas and improve employee training and evaluations.

By Allison Hearn