Planning

The primary product of the hospitality, gaming, and theme park industries is service. Since service is often consumed by the customer as it is produced, it is often difficult to anticipate and respond to guest needs. Providing quality service ensures your organization's success. The three tasks that comprise the Planning component are Planning (Labor), Scheduling, and Budgeting.

Typically, property forecasts are not translated into accurate labor requirements. In general, staffing levels remain the same for a broad range of volumes and only when business levels are very high or very low are they changed. LMS controls labor costs by using those forecasts to staff employees according to predicted volumes and measuring against standards. In other words, it helps you anticipate volume while ensuring the effective and efficient use of your available resources.

The major benefit of LMS's planning features is the ability to manage labor costs through the use of forecast hours and standard hours. Forecast hours are the number of labor hours, by individual job class, that are required to meet forecasted business volumes. These forecast hours are transferred and used by the system to generate a schedule. After the week is over, LMS then calculates how many labor hours should have been used to meet actual volumes. These hours are called standard hours.

During the configuration process, standards were established for each job at your property. These standards relate work requirements (how long it takes to do a specific task) to guest demands, as well as where appropriate to specific guest demand patterns. This lets you effectively schedule resources based on forecast hours.

Comparing forecast hours to scheduled hours and then to standard hours is an effective way to evaluate labor use and plan the efficient use of labor resources. LMS produces Weekly Plans to help department managers plan labor use and Daily Reports to evaluate performance.

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