Scheduling and manpower allocation for hotel banquet functions

Hotel banquet functions usually employ part-time workers as waiters and waitresses. These functions often end beyond the scheduled duration. In addition, there is also either a shortage or excess of workers for majority of the banquet functions, resulting in significant losses to the hotel not only in monetary terms, but also to the reputation of the hotel. In this paper, the Six Sigma methodology was employed to help a hotel understand their current situation and come out with solutions to address these problems. The systematic approach allowed all their banquet functions to end within a stipulated duration and controlled the labor cost with no out-of-control situations. The process capability was also vastly improved as a result. All the recommendations were summarized into a Visual Basic .Net program for easy use by the banquet supervisor, allowing him to retrieve the required information and perform scheduling and manpower allocation automatically.