Keeping just the right number of people on duty at any given time to ensure quality of service is a challenge at any hotel. Too many staff, and profits suffer; too few, and guests leave dissatisfied.

Okura Frontier Hotel Tsukuba (www.okura-tsukuba.co.jp) addresses this challenge with its restaurant using WINWORKS One. The workforce scheduling solution generates optimal work schedules for the hotel's restaurant staff, and has increased their productivity by 14 percent on average and 20 percent during peak hours.

Winworks`s Team Challenge:

Okura Hotel used to do its restaurant employee scheduling by hand. A broad range of factors had to be considered, such as number of shifts, tasks, customers and their preferences, seasonal variations, and holidays and vacations. Meeting these constraints, plus those set by the government's Labor Standards Law, resulted in inefficiencies in staffing.

By using WINWORKS One, Okura Hotel makes work schedules for its restaurant based on staff schedules and work regulations that more accurately correspond to room or banquet reservations. The hotel's management has also improved employee satisfaction by providing schedules that reflect individual preferences, ensuring a fair distribution of shifts among the employees. Since deploying the solution, the hotel has taken the number of customers from point-of-sale (POS) data, analyzed it for trends and created a model that forecasts the number of restaurant customers per hour for each day. This model enables the hotel to determine how many staff members are required for each hour of the work schedule.

Since the new scheduler can balance demand forecasts, work regulations and staff schedules, it has reduced staff during low demand periods and provided additional personnel for busy hours. This process has considerably improved customer service and minimized lost sales opportunities.

"WINWORKS One, we are not only optimizing work schedules and streamlining the creation processes, but also setting up efficient schedules that match different service demands, which in turn reduces our waste in work hours," says Hideyuki Miyota, deputy director, General Affairs Department of Okura Frontier Hotel Tsukuba. "Our goal was to reform hotel management and operations to avoid a loss of demand in our services, and WINWORKS One played a significant role in helping us achieve this."