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The hospitality sector in Singapore is facing a very tight labour market due to a combination of factors, namely, increasing youth aspiration, better educated workforce and the national labour policies on foreign workers. The hotel sector is particularly affected, especially the housekeeping department. Hotels in Singapore are now exploring ways to raise their housekeeping productivity, so as to be able to meet operational requirements albeit the smaller number of staff. Therefore, the aim of this applied research study was to explore the applicability of Lean, which has been successful in manufacturing, to hotel’s operations, particularly the housekeeping operations. Lean Management was therefore used to improve the productivity of the hotel housekeeping operations. A DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) approach, which is commonly used in Lean project, was adopted for this project. The data was analysed using Lean analysis tools and revealed the following: 1. Non-value added activities, that is, those that are not directly related to cleaning (processing) the room, account for as much as 44% or 211.2 minutes of the room attendant’s 8-hour work shift. 2. The cause and effect and waste analysis of the non-value added activities indicated that transportation and motion type wastes account for 18% of the non-value added activities while process design and inventory and supply management account for 26%. 3. Room attendants’ job scope design that requires room attendants to be responsible for guest laundry causes them to lose up to 54 minutes each time there is a guest laundry request. Improvement was focused on waste elimination. A houseman role was introduced to relieve the room attendants of the non-value added activities they currently perform. In addition, the housekeeping department implemented basic 5S to organize its back of the house, specifically the floor pantries. Regular department briefings were also moved to non-critical operation period and kept succinct. The post implementation measurement indicated that the streamlined processes freed 85 minutes of the room attendant time per shift. This enabled room attendant’s daily room output to be raised from 15 rooms per shift to 18 rooms per shift which represent a 20% increase in output without incurring any additional hours. In conclusion, this study provided evidence that Lean can be applied to hotel operations and can have a significant impact on work outcome. By redesigning work processes and systems to be leaner, a 20% increase in daily work outputs was possible. To drive output and efficiency event further, hotels should also explore automating some of their labor intensive process through the use of Information and Communication technology, smart devices, Radio Frequency Identification devices (RFID) and robotics. Key Words--Lean, Hotel Operations, Productivity Improvement, Housekeeping, automation

Application of Lean to Hotel's Operations Raising housekeeping productivityty