Implementing LEAN operations at Caesars casinos

NANCY LEA HYER, BRAD HIRSCH, KAREN A. BROWN

Why?

2008 Recession resulted in reduced customer spending on entertainment.

Declines in revenue.

Increase in market share competition.

Focus on strengths and differences of Caesars Casinos

Customer service – essential to their business

Key metric – Customer Rated survey A, B, C, D or F. Track conversion from B to A.

LEAN would create a consistent and focused approach to process improvement for all areas of the business. – Kitchen, Check-in/out, Room cleaning, Gambling floor, Staffing, etc.

Kaizen Day 1 – Training and such

D.O.W.N.T.I.M.E. Defects – delivering drink with ice, when no ice was requested. Checking into room

with incorrect bed type.

Overproduction – Three lemon slices in water (customer would be satisfied with one)

Waiting – running out of a type of chip, slow process of chip replenishment

Not Engaging People (employees) – Pushing food carts through deep carpet.

Transportation – a bottle of beer stored in up to 5 different locations before consumption

Inventory – slot machine print voucher paper, buy set amount every month regardless of what was on hand/being used up.

Motion – storing bottles of water in ice tubs instead of refrigerator. Had to dry off every bottle before serving

Extra Processing – metal-detecting wand to scan bags of trash for coin smuggling. Still in practice even after metal coins were eliminated from operations.

Kaizen Day 2 - Gemba

Gemba walk and Value Stream Mapping. Create list of waste identified in DOWNTIME

Organize/prioritize waste Matrix

Easy to Remove + Large Impact

Hard to Remove + Large Impact

Easy to Remove + Low Impact

Hard to Remove + Low Impact

Kaizen Day 3 – Five Whys

Identify the root cause of each waste in the Easy to Remove + Large Impact category.

Why are attendants spending four hours a day polishing clean silverware? Silverware has spots – unacceptable presentation

Why does the silverware have spots? They come out of the dishwasher with spots.

Why does the dishwasher leave spots on the silverware? It doesn’t hold consistent temperature during one phase of the cleaning cycle.

Why doesn’t it hold consistent temp. during that cycle? One portion of preventative maintenance procedure isn’t consistent with manufacture’s guidelines.

How can we remedy the situation?

Revise preventative maintenance protocol up to standard.

Results 60 kaizen events in one year

400 employees invested over 14,000 hours in effort

34 VPs and directors had participated in the kaizen events

3% shift from B to A scores (the amount needed to maximize employee service bonuses)

Waste elimination generated annual cost savings of $3 million.

Take-away Vital role of senior leadership involvement.

Provided ownership and satisfaction to individual team members.

Kaizen events as a true employee engagement tool

“I wish these kaizens had been implemented a long time ago. It would have made our jobs easier.”

Continuously improve every process.

Needs to come from the ground up.

In your area of work:

Find one example of waste.

Defect

Overproduction

Waiting

Not Engaging People

Transportation

Inventory

Motion

Extra processing

Challenges to Implement LEAN in your workplace

Cost

Training

Labor

Production

Buy-in (hourly vs. salaried employees)

Culture shift – have deal with problems as they arise not tomorrow

Does it have to be All vs. Nothing?

Analysis Paper

Purpose – Create a reporting system that will Identify the “drum” or bottleneck in our workflow so we can 1) set pace with all other stages 2) eventually improve said bottleneck.

Problem – Our LEAN-capable workflow is gradually shifting to a batch mode, ebb-flow situation because so many stages in the process have excess capacity (inventory storage, machine hours)

So What? Will allow to scale appropriately. Current ebb-flow processing structure not sustainable at larger volumes. Reporting will help prevent problems before they arise, not after project is behind schedule.

Variables – Process related: Time for each machine process. Time for each human process. Time between each process. Takt time. Amount of buffer that should be built into each process. Quality related: Frequency of rework, % of corrections in keyed data.