Squeezing ever more efficiency out of your operations is a never-ending process for any business, but for hotels and casinos, the challenge is multiplied by the variety of services being offered to customers. And with so much to mange, there is a magnified opportunity for things to go wrong that turn customers off and degrade the overall impression that you want visitors to when they walk out the door.
Challenges Facing Casino Facilities Managers
Even small and medium-sized casino complexes run the gamut with facilities management challenges. Combining lodging, food service, shopping, entertainment and the complicated world of gaming into a single venue is like a perfect storm of hospitality industry management disasters waiting to happen. Unclean hotel suites, broken gaming machines, non-functioning fixtures or exhibits — everything from a malfunctioning ice machine to a non-operational HVAC system can impact one or many visitors.
Layer on top of that the pool facilities, spas, special exhibits and even zoos and museums, and you can start to imagine the kind of pressure that facilities managers are under to ensure things go smoothly for their guests, all while keeping the operational concerns behind the scenes from tying their work crews into knots.
Each of these different facilities comes with their own unique maintenance and management challenges, and they’re often managed by different departments. This also means the systems used to track their inventory, schedule regular preventative maintenance and distribute work crews based on the priority of jobs that need to be done. That maze of spreadsheets and disconnected software can often bring the operations of different departments into conflict.
Casino Maintenance with CMMS Software
Having a single, unified maintenance and tracking system helps managers to see and plan around conflicts with other departments to keep the customer experience undisturbed and continuous. Even when maintenance for the various hospitality services of a hotel and casino are managed separately, a single system helps standardize the way maintenance is performed company-wide, and enables each manager to see what other projects are happening that may impact their own.
It’s hard to understate the widespread effect that can have on customer experience. Customers may not always be vocal about having an adequate or as-expected experience, but they will certainly let it be known when their experience has been less than satisfactory. To preserve your reputation as a destination, and to ensure that customers keep coming back, you have to eliminate as many of these pain-points as possible. That means limiting downtime for customer facing facilities.
Offensive Rather than Defensive Maintenance
A CMMS system alone is not enough to preserve a uniform customer experience; it takes judgment and planning to make sure that your work crews are not scrambling to catch up. The answer is both a combination of forward-thinking and computerized maintenance management software. A system that tracks all work orders and scheduled maintenance, unifying all maintenance activity and inventory information into a single place, lets you ensure that regularly scheduled maintenance doesn’t take precedence over tasks that more directly affect customer experience.
For instance, regularly changing the drive belts for dryers in your laundry facilities can help prevent costly breakdowns, but those tasks can be more flexibly rescheduled than a faulty air conditioner in a paying customer’s room or a bank of broken slot machines on the gaming floor.
It’s much simpler to shift work crews to one task over another when you can get a birds-eye view of maintenance happening throughout your organization. Likewise, you can analyze your inventory fluctuations over time to anticipate when you’ll need to order more to deal with seasonal changes in demand for any branch of the casino. Harnessing all of your data into one system like this has ripple-effects throughout your entire organization, and it can only provide you with tools that help you ensure every customer is happy when they walk out the door.
Author bio: Derek Smith is a marketing manager for ManagerPlus. When he isn’t writing about CMMS software, you can find him in the canyons along the Wasatch Front, climbing, hiking, fishing and smelling like campfire smoke.
