It’s time to move away from the days of pen and paper scheduling!
Contact fcs.sales@planet1world.com to see FCS suite of solutions in action.
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Smarter housekeeping management with FCS suite of solutions
In the last contribution to the hsk-knowledge.com article section, we explored the benefits of using an automated housekeeping solution to empower employees and unlock their full potential. There is no escaping the fact that technology is now driving hotel operations, with the biggest technology changes taking place back-of-house to help a hotel streamline its operations.
With a plethora of housekeeping solutions available on the market, selecting one that will not only improve your daily operations but will also provide maximum return on your investment, is key. Finding the best housekeeping solution for your hotel can be daunting, especially when you don’t have a clear understanding of all the essential features and capabilities you need.
FCS Housekeeping is a web and mobile solution that streamlines housekeeping operations by removing manual work streams and reducing the duplication of tasks. With functions for reporting, inventory management and tracking, FCS Housekeeping supports housekeeping teams in optimising their interaction with guests and empowering them to focus on providing a superior guest experience.
Going paperless
FCS Housekeeping comes with a complete set of features that take the hard work out of the daily planning and running of your housekeeping operations. The intuitive and easy-to-use web-based solution efficiently helps you manage your staff’s productivity at the click of a button. The system allows you to assign basic housekeeping duties, manage rosters, allocate room and public area cleaning tasks and enables room inspections. In addition, you can prioritise rooms based on room status, room type and guest type, assign housekeeping tasks to attendants based on custom rules such as credits or location, and monitor the status of rooms with the inspection matrix.
Working on the go
With the FCS Housekeeping mobile app, efficiency is taken to a whole new level. For Room Attendants on duty, the mobile app enhances their daily productivity. Guidelines with photos are available on the app to ensure housekeeping tasks are performed in accordance with the hotel’s standards. Room Attendants can update turndown and job status on assigned tasks separately from their cleaning assignments with credit and time calculation, ensuring that they get paid for the work they have completed. Supervisors can issue cleaning and inspection assignments from anywhere at any time and team members can contact each other via the Messenger function to allow for the smooth and efficient running of your daily housekeeping service.
Automating room assignments
Supervisors tend to spend a lot of time daily to manually plan their schedule for the day. Using boards or paper, they assign the cleaning of rooms to the housekeeping attendants. And while they can plan ahead as best as possible, they can never fully predict guest movements throughout the day. Often a Room Attendant heads to an assigned room, only to find it set to Do-Not-Disturb (DND), leading to time spent unnecessarily trying to figure out the next room to clean. FCS Housekeeping automatically pushes a room activated with DND to the bottom of the list of rooms to clean. The RA can check the FCS Housekeeping mobile app to see which room they should clean next, removing any delays and ensuring that a guest does not get interrupted.
Cleaning all areas of the hotel
Most housekeeping solutions on the market can only manage the cleaning schedule of hotel guest rooms. FCS Housekeeping takes it one step further – managing the cleaning schedule of public areas such as lobbies and meeting rooms. RAs can be assigned to clean public areas as part of their roster, ensuring that the cleaning of public areas is not only remembered but is completed on time and with minimum guest interruption.
Assuring quality
FCS Housekeeping’s QR code solution adds a real edge to the quality assurance of cleaned rooms, ensuring accuracy and effectiveness. By scanning a QR code that has been placed in a room, the RA can make sure that they are cleaning the correct room and track the start and completion time of the room cleaning.
Prioritising staff safety
Staff safety and security is a priority, and should never be taken for granted. In case of an emergency, a user can activate the panic button to trigger an SMS, a direct phone call or an alarm will sound directly from the FCS Housekeeping mobile app to escalate the situation and ask for help.
Enhancing the guest experience
Delivering an exceptional guest experience is no easy feat. FCS Housekeeping comes with a guest profile tool that can track guest information and preferences, in order to provide a personalised guest experience. With FCS Housekeeping being synced with the hotel’s Property Management System (PMS), the hotel can also pull up the guest history, and prepare for the guest’s stay in advance. Whether they prefer a king bed or extra towels during their stay, the information is readily available to anticipate guests’ needs and therefore, to create a memorable guest experience.
Monitoring your Key Performance Indicators
Besides a dashboard that gives you a complete overview of everything that is going on in the hotel, FCS Housekeeping is able to generate customised reports of all housekeeping activity to share with management. Room status forecasts (expected total rooms of new arrivals, in-house and checked-out guests), linen forecasts and manpower forecasts can also be generated based on history logs in order to optimise resource and amenity planning ahead of time.
In an increasingly competitive environment, and faced with ever-changing guest needs and preferences, hotels need to continually look for ways to differentiate themselves through the delivery of a superior guest experience. FCS Housekeeping will help streamline operations, improve productivity, increase efficiency and save time and money, allowing employees to spend more time with the guest, and hence being able to deliver a more personalised guest experience. FCS Housekeeping can be seamlessly integrated with other solutions – FCS Connect, FCS Engineering, FCS Concierge and FCS Recovery – for consolidated data and workflow management.
It’s time to move away from the days of pen and paper scheduling. Contact fcs.sales@planet1world.com to see FCS suite of solutions in action.