MGT 6720 - Implementing LEAN Operations at Caesars Casinos V2

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.