What do hotel visitors value most of all? Of course they want to live in good looking rooms, be able to use phone and the Internet, receive additional services as well as be able to enjoy exquisite cuisine. Yes, many people choose hotels just by the cuisine and reputation of hotel restaurants. This especially concerns five star hotels that attract wealthy people who love spending money eating excellent food. The world famous chefs often work in hotel restaurants. They create excellent reputation and in a certain way become the most effective advertising and promotion tool for hotel owners. If hotel managers want to improve performance and achieve positive financial results they have to pay a proper attention to hotel restaurants or kitchen. This may be as separate evaluation or a part of the huge process to measure efficiency of hotel administration.
Balanced scorecard is being actively used in various industries, including hotel industry. This fantastic performance evaluation and strategic management tool helps put strategy into action. Of course, balanced scorecard will not solve all business problems at once. However, it will help visualize strategy and locate problems and the discrepancies from strategic goals. The principle behind balanced scorecard is quite simple – it uses key performance indicators to measure progress or regress of the company on its way to implement strategic goals. In terms of hotel industry, these key performance indicators are related to everything happening inside and outside of a hotel. Evaluation of hotel kitchen performance is a very important process. Much money is spent to maintain kitchen and offer visitors breakfasts and dinners. This money may be spent in efficiently or hotel visitors do not like what they are served. Balanced scorecard can certainly help find out problematic areas in a hotel kitchen as well as solve problems in order to achieve strategic goals. Every hotel owner is dreaming of having an excellent reputation due to its world famous cuisine.
Key performance indicators for hotel kitchen evaluation fall into four categories: financial, customer, internal processes, learning and growth. In fact, these are universal balanced scorecard categories used in various industries. Thus, let’s analyze each category in the context of hotel kitchen performance evaluation.
Financial category covers all key performance indicators related to expenses and revenues of the hotel kitchen. The hotel spends some money to buy food, maintain restaurant and kitchen, pay waiters and chefs. In return, customers either by dinners or dinner costs are included to the room fee. Evaluation of financial indicators will help examine profitability of kitchen.
Customer key performance indicators cover satisfaction of customers with existing cuisine, their preferences and demands. Customer satisfaction is all important since everything done by the hotel staff is done for customers. Such indicators as new dishes and drinks per 100 customers or time spent by one customer in a hotel restaurant can help learn additional knowledge on hotel customers and their preferences in cuisine.
Internal processes and learning and growth categories refer to personnel of the hotel kitchen. Here one can use such indicators as number of training sessions per employee, average amount spent to educate one waiter etc.
Source by Sam Miller