About the customer & their challenges
The Hotel Am Wartturm is a lovely boutique hotel in the beautiful town of Speyer, Germany. With 17 rooms and seven serviced apartments, the hotel offers the perfect environment for anyone who wants to feel at home in this city with its famous cathedral. Christian and Michaela Heck personally look after the wellbeing of their guests and the employees of the cozy 3-star hotel share their passion for hospitality.
A particular challenge for this privately run hotel is that the owners are the main source of knowledge about the hotel, meaning that they would normally need to be available at all times. That’s why the Heck family was looking for a way to document their knowledge about the business. They wanted to encourage their employees to work more independently – to give them greater freedom to make decisions based on in-depth knowledge.
Even for our small team, hotelkit offers many benefits for our daily operations, which has made it a key component of our business. We can’t imagine life without itanymore – we are huge fans.
And so that both back-of-house and front-of-house operations run smoothly, they wantedman optimized task management system with a better structure for daily processes as well as more transparent communication throughout the whole team.
Implementation & Test Phase
They had learned about the software during a scientific study that had researched digitization processes in small, owner-run hotels. Christian Heck initially had concerns that his company, with only around six employees, would be too small for hotelkit. After the first evaluation period, they decided to continue on to a trial period in mid-2013. The team used this free trial period to put hotelkit through its paces. The employee software was used in daily operations to test whether the digitization of the workflow would have a positive impact on the whole team.
Results
The Hotel Am Wartturm has now been a hotelkit customer since mid-2013, and Christian Heck is a loyal fan. “hotelkit has become a key component of our business. All processes are documented there; our employees can work independently, which is an enormous relief for us as owners. Now we are much more relaxed when we go to events or on vacation!” he says with excitement.
From the very beginning, the Heck family and their team of around six employees enthusiastically dived into using hotelkit. Over the years, over 16,500 tasks have been completed, which is an average of almost twelve tasks per day. The greatest boon for the business is the handbook, which documents all knowledge needed for daily operations in Hotel Am Wartturm with around 340 articles. Around seven new articles are added each month, and existing knowledge is updated regularly.
Daily communication takes place via handovers, of which there have been 1,270 so far. Each month, eight news articles help to keep the team up to date about major changes. Even if a team member has the day off or is on vacation, all important information is available in a central location when they return. Events and meetings for the different departments are clearly coordinated across six calendars with a total of 390 entries.
All necessary information is available in a central location, which has made us much quicker and more efficient.
But hotelkit also assists the team in Speyer with its daily operations. So far, a total of 1,600 tasks have been completed and, since the implementation of the checklist tool in mid-2016, six checklists that repeat at various intervals are now available. Using the new repair tool (in use since the beginning of 2015), the team has documented and dealt with a total of 90 instances of damages at regular intervals. This gives the owner an excellent overview for future investments.
“I love working with the hotelkit team,” says Heck. “Along with their innovative software, they always have a ready ear for ideas and very specific questions. Our account manager is familiar with our business and knows right away how she can help. You don’t find that type of service very often in the software industry!”
About the author
Julia Stiefsohn
Enjoys giving websites an attractive look, this blog also bears her creative handwriting, at least in part. Speaking of handwriting: every now and then, when she’s in the flow, she also writes.
