The Housekeeper Performance Evaluation System Tourism Essay

The housekeeper performance evaluation system consist a lot of information and guidance in order to develop the project. Using useful information and guidance from other researcher, the objective can be achieved and the idea can be generated before the system can be developed. The information can be diverging into several perspectives which are hotel perspective, housekeeper overview, system overview and related works.

According to Brock et al. (2002) the word hotel from English dictionary was inherited from the 17th century French word explaining about the type of shelter providing overnight lodging. Hotel is part of tourism industries which increase the economic growth of cities, regions and even nations as well as greatly influenced by the development of transportation. According to The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the estimation of tourism jobs in 2015 will increase to 269.5 million (Sian et al., 2009). The world region that is expected to have the most tourism job growth is the Asia Pacific. Malaysia is a part of the tourism country in the Asia Pacific. This sector is expected to grow faster than other economic sector. Nevertheless, the world’s hotel inventory is estimated to increase about 2.5 percent per year. In the tourism industry, the most widely known organization is the World Tourism Organization (WTO). It is non-governmental organizations that give world understanding of the contribution of tourism. In mean time, it also helps in raising standard of living in less developed areas through tourism development.

Types of Hotel

Commercial Hotel

A hotel that provides overnight accommodation, goods and services to the transient public or temporary guests needing accommodation for a few nights. Example is Hotel Hilton, Kuala Lumpur.

Residential Hotel

In contrast to transient hotels, some hotels have traditionally provided accommodation for long-term guests. The hotel is for their temporary or a permanent home. Example is Hotel Ascott, Kuala Lumpur.

Resort Hotel

The hotel is established with feature recreational activities for guest. These activities may be strictly for enjoyment, health purpose or both. Example is Hotel Pelangi Beach Resort Langkawi, Malaysia.

Airport Hotel

Hotel is located near an airport catering to short stopovers or passengers of cancelled flights, providing limousine with pick-up schedule. Example is Hotel Pan Pacific KLIA.

Economy Hotel

Hotel is for cost-conscious travelers. Example is Hotel Formula 1, France.

Casino Hotel

A casino hotel is a smaller hotel with a casino. It also provides lavish entertainment such as nationally known artists and professionally staged shows added attraction. Example is Genting Hotels.

Department in a Hotel

Front of the House

Areas in a hotel where guests come into direct contact such as the lobby, front desk, restaurant and guest rooms.

Back of the House

Areas in a hotel where guest do not come into contact, such as kitchen, laundry and staff cafeteria.

Revenue Centre

A centre that use to generates incomes such as rooms division and food and beverage department.

Cost Centre

A centre that cannot generates incomes such as maintenance, accounts, marketing and human resource.

Hotel Classification System

According to Research Department of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (2002), before hotels become official member of tourism, there are no minimum standard or scheme to identify the quality of each hotel. The rating system emerged out of efforts by the Automobile and cycling clubs in Europe, which recommended to their membership based on the guaranteed facilities which this hotel offered. This led to the establishment of rating systems such as the Automobile Association (AA) and its American counterpart the (AAA) and the Michelin tyre company’s – Michelin Red Guide and other Mobil guides.

Official Hotel and Resort Guide (OHRG)

OHRG is widely use for tourism hotel industry classification system around the world. Perkins (2008) state the most widely used for classification system ratings is the 10-level classification pioneered by the OHRG. There are ten quality levels which is Super Deluxe, Deluxe, Moderate Deluxe, Superior First Class, First Class, Limited Services First Class, Moderate First Class, Superior Tourism, Tourism and Moderate Tourism. These rating combine two elements which is quality of quest accommodations, size and number of public rooms and meeting facilities. Typically, first class hotels operate based on hotel specification from OHRG.

AA Rating System (British System)

The system focuses on a consumer’s perspective on lodging properties. The objective was to introduce a classification system easily understood by the consumer. These systems are rate from one to five that used to assess guest accommodation. The American version is the AAA system. According to WTO (2004), AAA overhauls its ratings standard every five year and invites industry representatives to comment. There are several AA rating systems that can be classify which are one star, two star, three star, four start and five star hotel.

Organization Chart of a Large Hotel

The figure shows the orientation chart of a large hotel.

Figure 2.1: Orientation Charts of Large Hotel (Sian et al., 2009)

HOUSEKEEPER OVERVIEW

Definition

Housekeeper is jobs that supervise work activities of cleaning personnel to ensure clean, orderly attractive room in hotel, hospitals and similar establishment: Obtains list of vacant rooms which need to be cleaned immediately and list of prospective check-outs or discharges in order to prepare work assignments. Assigns workers their duties, and inspects work for conformance to prescribed standards of cleanliness. (http:// www.careerplanner.com)

Housekeeper Works

Housekeeping in a hotel is a very physically challenging job that includes many different tasks. Each housekeeper is responsible for cleaning a number of rooms per shift depend on of the size of room and the numbers of beds. On top of that, a housekeeper needs a length of time to complete one room. There are many tasks that need to carry out including making beds, tidying rooms, polishing toilet, washing floors, removing stains and vacuuming. Figures below show a housekeeper perform several tasks cleaning the rooms.

Figure 2.2: Making Beds (http://www.ccohs.ca)

Figure 2.3: Tidying Rooms (http://www.ccohs.ca)

Figure 2.3: Polishing Toilets (http://www.ccohs.ca)

Housekeeper Requirement Skills

Every hotel desires to deliver great services to their customer to make a good profit and also a good feedback. Therefore, each housekeeper must have a skill, knowledge and abilities to perform their works. There are several requirements which are customer and personal service, service orientation, active listening, management of material resources, equipment selection, equipment maintenance, trunk strength and stamina.

Customer and personal service

It is knowledge of how to give customer and personal service. This including figuring out what the customer needs, meeting the standard set of services and evaluating customer satisfaction.

Service orientation

It is knowledge of actively looking way to help people.

Active listening

Knowing how to get and appropriately use equipment, facilities, and materials needed to do certain work.

Management of material resources

It is knowledge of how to give customer and personal service. This including figuring out what the customer needs, meet.ing the standard set of services and evaluating customer satisfaction

Equipment selection

Determining the kind of tools and equipment needed to do a job.

Trunk strength

The ability to use your abdominal and lower back muscles to support part of the body repeatedly or continuously over time without ‘giving out’ or getting fatigued.

Stamina

The ability to exert yourself physically over long periods of time without getting winded or out-of-breath.

OVERVIEW OF HOUSEKEEPER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION SYSTEM

The growth of information technology gives benefit to our daily life especially in industry sector. All these technology are created to make works more efficient and assist people to avoid unnecessary mistake. Housekeeper performance evaluation system is proposed to help supervisor to keep track and monitor each housekeeper in their hotel. This system can help supervisor recognize and identify whether housekeeper is doing a good job or not.

The result of each housekeeper is based on the daily data input that is done by the room supervisor. The supervisor will check every cleaning room and evaluate each room using client pocket pc that connected wirelessly to the web server. The system automatically calculates the point of each task based on rating scheme. The system uses a rule-based system to generate useful information by giving a percentage of grades for every housekeeper in the hotel. The grade will determine the performance level of housekeeper.

The system is diverge into three process with is the client application, web server application and the database. The client application is a web-based application which allow supervisor to monitor every housekeeper in the hotel. Web server will handle the service process between client application and the database. The database is the storage location of housekeeper data that require by the system to evaluate the housekeeper.

3-Tier Client-Server Architecture

There are 3 essential components for 3-Tier client-server architecture which is a client pc, an application server and a database server. The standard 3-tier architecture consists of presentation and application logic in the client, application and business logic in a middle tier application server and data managed by database server in the third tier (Bretl et al., n.d). There are several consideration in 3-tier architecture which a client program contain presentation logic only and one server handles many client request. The figure shows 3-tier architecture.

Figure 2.4: 3-tier architecture (Kambalyal, n.d)

Performance Evaluation System

There are two phases that are involved in the performance evaluation system. The phases are; the evaluation criteria and the rating result.

Details of each phase will discussed below.

Evaluation criteria are the guidelines for the system to evaluate a housekeeper regarding of each tasks done by them.

Rating result is the information or hypotheses that have produce using rules-based system to generate result of evaluated housekeeper and to measure the housekeeper performance.

Rating Scheme Mechanism

To measure the quality service level of each room, the scheme mechanism is needed as a benchmark and requirement for the housekeeper to follow by implement to the system. There are three characteristic which are time, number of room and quality level of room.

Details of each characteristic will discussed below.

The time is referring how fast the housekeeper starts clean the room until finished.

The number of room is referring how many rooms the housekeeper clean in one day during job.

The quality level is referring to the room condition.

Rule-Based

Ruled-based system is a system that leads a new method to solve problems. The alternative ways to replace the knowledge in using static way, rule-based system represents knowledge in term of a bunch of rules that tells the system what it should do or what it can conclude in different kind of situations. A rule-based system consist a set of IF-THEN rules, a bunch of facts and an interpreter controlling the application of the rules, given the facts. This two set is used to formulate high-level query to low-level query that can directly use to extracted features.

There are two major types of inference methods that commonly used which are backward chaining and forwards chaining. This two chaining have different method. The forward chaining is a data driven and the backward chaining is for goal-driven. As for forward chaining it start with the initial content of the workspace and keep using rules to draw new conclusion given those facts. However, for backward chaining is start with the hypothesis or solution to reach processed first and keep looking for rules that allow proving the hypothesis (Abraham, n.d.). Figure below show the example of forward and backward chaining.

Figure 2.5: Example of forward chaining (Kamaruddin, 2009)

Figure 2.6: Example of backward chaining (Kamaruddin, 2009)

RELATED WORKS

DEA ANN Approach in Supplier Evaluation System

Author: Dilek Ã-zdemir, and Gül Tekin Temur (2009)

This paper discuss how to strength partnership with supplier using significant factor for enhancing competitiveness. This evaluation system is basically developed in term of criteria such as quality, cost, delivery and flexibility. The technique that applied to the system is using an expert system by designing Artificial Neural Network (ANN) on the supplier evaluation process that support with Data Employment Analysis (DEA).

As stated in the research, the Supplier evaluation system is applied on the data of 24 suppliers, which have long-term relationship with medium sized company from German Iron and Steel Industry. The data of supplier consist of variable such as material quality (MQ), discount of amount (DOA), discount of cash (DOC), payment term (PT), delivery time (DT) and manual revenue (AR). In the meantime, DEA is added to the supplier evaluation system in order to use them as system output.

Compare to this project, the research applies knowledge based technique using Artificial Neural Network to developed Supplier Evaluation System, whereas, as for this project the Housekeeper Performance Evaluation System is using Rules-Based System as knowledge based technique to generate housekeeper performance results.

Developing a Performance Evaluation System for Charter Schools: The Balance Scorecard Approach

Author: Richard S. Brown & Priscilla Wohlstet.ter (n.d.)

This research shows a process of developing a set. of performance indices for charter school using data that public schools routinely report to state educational agencies for compliances purposes. This system helps to identify promising practices that would improve student achievement.

According to this research, the performance evaluation system is based on the idea of the balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard is a way of looking at multiple measure of a system performance in a balanced way. It approach assists organizations in developing and focusing on measurable goals. The research identify four key perspective to based on balance scorecard approach to measuring a system performance which is customer perspective, an internal perspective, financial perspective and a learning or innovation perspective.

In contrast with this research done by Richard S. Brown and Priscilla Wohlstet.ter which use a balance scorecard as a performance index, this project will use a standardize rating scheme to evaluate the housekeeper performance.

A Role-based Online Evaluation System

Author: Thomas Price, Jeromie Walters and Yingcai Xiao (n.d.)

This research illustrate the design and implementation of a Role-based Online Evaluation System (ROES) which originally designed to be a user friendly, generic and is a web based system for student to rate their instructors. This system gives immediate and flexible feedback available to reviewer and also much easier to administer than paper-based evaluations.

Based on the research done, the online student teacher evaluation system to rate teaching effectiveness is becoming more popular by replacing existing paper system. The system is design to be made accessible and customizable so that it can serve any number of institution, as well as, user friendly and anonymous so that anyone including student will not be afraid to use it. ROES are a web based application allow user to create an account and specify rating needs of different academic discipline within the institution.

This research has some similarity with this project, as it also implement a rating scheme to evaluate teaching effectiveness using web based application. For this project, the housekeeper performance evaluation system have standardize rating scheme to evaluate housekeeper performance.