Summary

The Cockpit is used to manage hours and labor cost. Her you get an overview of worked and scheduled hours, imported from your Time Keeping System (TKS), recorded in the schedules module or entered manually; you can also move hours between cockpits. Different graphs show how the department is performing according to set productivity targets. In the settings you can administer cost drivers, minimum and maximum hours and horizon days.

Intended Users

Cockpit Owners

Instructions

The cockpits can be accessed by clicking on the icon on the home page, using the quick link on the left, go via the main menu or clicking the corresponding arrow in Management Perspective.

The purpose of the Labor Cockpit is to optimize staffing and schedule according to budgeted and forecasted productivity target. A productivity target is expected outcome per labor hour; cost driver divided by hours.

All labor resource Cockpits are organized the same way except that they have different cost drivers, i.e. the factor that drives labour hours and cost in a department.

For example: The most common cost driver for Housekeeping is Room Nights since the number of rooms occupied will drive the need for labor hours, thus labour costs, in this department. 50 hours are used to clean 100 rooms gives you a productivity of 2 – 100/50=2. If your productivity target is 2.5 you should only need 40 hours to clean 100 rooms. 100/2.5=40

• In most cases the cost drivers are standard:
• Front Office – Rooms occupied tonight
• Housekeeping – Rooms occupied last night
• Breakfast – Number of covers (guests eating breakfast)
• Restaurants – Revenue

Cost drivers can be set and changed from the Tools menu (if you have the user rights). Each cockpit is picking up the live forecast from the respective revenue centers, which is why it is so important that the live forecast is correct and credible.

1. The large top graph shows (1) labor hours, (2) productivity or (3) consumption. You decide what is to compare by ticking the radio buttons above the graph

1 Hours

• The blue bars are worked hours for passed days and scheduled hours for the future. Some entities have different coloured bars separating productive and non productive hours.

• Non-productive hours are paid absence, i.e. for example, paid sick leave, training or off-duty meetings.

• The yellow line shows the SMART hours per day; i.e. actual or live forecast cost driver divided by productivity target. You can also chose to see the SMART budget, a brown line, by marking this below the graph.

TIP – If the yellow or brown lines are at zero you are most likely missing a productivity/hours forecast or budget or there is no live forecast for the period.

2 Productivity

• The blue bars show average productivity per hour
• The yellow line shows your forecasted productivity target. This will be the same every day. You can also choose to see the budgeted productivity target, which will show a brown line

TIP: You are not expected to be exactly on the productivity line every day, but accumulated for the month you should be as close as possible. You may see that kitchen or M&E Operations appear underproductive a day because they are “producing” for an upcoming event. On the day of the event, they may then appear overproductive.

3 Consumption

• The blue bars show minutes spent per cost driver output. For instance how many minutes the housekeeping department spent on each occupied room last night.
• The yellow or brown line show your forecasted or budgeted expectations.

There are one or two dotted vertical lines in the graph for the current month. The black line indicates today’s date, days to the left are history and to the right the future days. The green line indicate horizon days – up until that point, the blue bars are scheduled hours; after that the blue bars are the SMART hours.

Resource hours

The table on the right is an overview of the month with expected results, productivity target and labor hours. you can see the monthly table.

1. The monthly forecast is opened/closed by ticking the +/- on the left.
2. The total forecasted hours needed for the month. This is a static number and should not be changed during the period. Forecasted cost driver divided by the productivity target gives the hours.
3. The forecasted cost driver. In this example from front office, the hotel has forecasted 13’330 rooms occupied for the month. This should not change during the period.
4. The forecasted productivity target. Forecasted cost driver divided by the forecasted hours gives the productivty target.
5. Lists the worked/scheduled hours per day for the period, separating productive and non-productive hours.
6. Lists the actual/live forecasted cost driver per day.
7. Additional measurements for information only. The daily figures are taken from relevant live forecast or imported file (for example from Opera)
8. You can choose to see more – the whole month; or less – the next ten days.

If the input boxes are red, the hours for this day has not been saved:

Fixed hours are often used for departments with fixed staffing not particularly affected by level of activity (apart from extreme situations like COVID-19 in 2020). The fixed hours can be applied to the whole department or part of a department. The amount of fixed hours should be entered via the budget and forecast module for the months in question.

Use for whole departments like executive office, finance, sales. The fixed hours will be distributed evenly over 7 days of the week, i.e. the graph in the cockpit will be a straight line. SMART hours will not change per day since they are not affected by the cost driver.

Use for part of a department when you have a minimum staffing regardless of occupancy when the hotel is open.

An example could be at the Front desk, this is usually open 24/7. Irrelevant of how many guests are staying at the property (1 or 100), On an average month fixed hours will be 24 hours x 30 days = 720 hours.

Min/Max – To be able to set the minimum and maximum hours per day this must be activated in Tools Settings. The setting can be applied for a season/period or without an end date.

Best Practice

The cockpit owners/head of departments are responsible for verifying correct information in PMI daily. Be Proactive, not reactive. Take a closer look at your hours in the upcoming days. Do you see any days where you could dispense the hours smarter? Has your hotel’s On the Books (OTB) situation changed because a large group booking cancelled? On days when there is a considerable difference between the hours and the yellow line, why is this?

• If productivity in the restaurant was particularly high, how did this affect the level of service?
• If productivity in FO was very low, did you need all the hours? – Is the schedule for the upcoming period realistic? Are you optimizing the use of your staff?
• Do you have many guests checking out on a specific day? Do you really need 2 staff members on the late shift with only minimal check in? If you are working with a Time Keeping System (TKS) all changes in hours, past or future, must be done there and not in PMI. If you are working with PMIs scheduling module, make any changes in the cockpit for the past or update the schedule for the future.

TIP – Dates written in purple means a bank holiday period. (This is not country specific)

Comments – use the comments in the table to explain discrepancies or special incidents that are worth remembering or explaining. It is not necessasry to write if anyone is sick since this is already visible through the shift codes used. Do not write any names in the comments since these are visible to everyone and are not relevant to staffing or productivity.

12. Wallet – Below the daily graph, there are two different graphs, Summary, which can display either month to date figures (MTD), i.e. Actual result so far, or Live Forecast, i.e. Actual plus Forecasted (scheduled). The left graph can either show the hours used or the labor cost in your local currency, compared to Forecast, Budget and Last Year. Live Forecast is the sum of hours used so far in the month + scheduled hours for the rest of the month. Forecast, budget and last year are calculated by using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic & Time sensitive) calculation. Both Forecast and Budget are then calculated by taking the actual activity and dividing it by the Budget/Forecasted productivity. Last Year is calculated by dividing Last Year’s productivity and this year’s activity, so that the comparison is valid even if you have more or less to do in the department this year. 

If you hover over the Live Forecast column with the mouse you will see how many hours are Non Productive and how many hours are Productive. If looking at currency you will have the same split. 

MTD or Month end Key Figures – On the bottom of the page, there are two graphs showing a summary of hours, total labour cost and accummulated productivity.

The graph on the left displays the actual number of hours compared to SMART forecast, budget or last year. When hovering over the actual hours, a dialogue box will tell you the split of productive and non productive hours. Choosing the currency will show the accumulated labor cost.

The graph on the right shows the Total productivity (output per hour), including non-productive hours. Opr. Prod includes only the operational or productive hours. Cons. show consumption, or minutes spent on each output unit.

TIP- Consumption is mostly interesting for FO, housekeeping and possibly breakfast – it will show you how much time is spent on average per occupied room or covers. For departments with a revenue cost driver, it is not relevant to see how much time is spent on earning one Euro.

Rates are the average cost per hour including social costs, excluding bonuses (this might differe from company to company, depending on individual policies). The rates are only visible for the cockpit owner and administrative staff. These are calculated by dividing total labor cost for the month by the hours. Read more about Labor Cost handling in PMI here.

Below Rates you see the Schedules created for this Cockpit. It shows an overview of total scheduled and unspecified hours, as well as Productive and Unproductive labor hours. You enter a Schedule by clicking on its name.  

Outsourced departments

If a department, for example, housekeeping, is fully outsourced and you have no influence over the hours, you can set the department to update automatically. No hours will be imported when using this function. PMI will add hours for past days automatically by dividing the cost driver by your productivity target and save. Calculate how many hours you should use per day instead of adding the exact number of hours. The horizon will be set to zero days so you can only see SMART hours for the future. There is no option to make any manual changes to the cockpit or hours. Please contact support@d2o.com to activate this option.  

If you have a mix of your own staff plus some outsourced, you will need to create a separate cockpit for each, as they cannot be combined.

Tools

The tools menu gives several options to manipulate or make changes to how the cockpit works in a specific department. I.e. Min/max hours, cost drivers, adding schedules, change seasons, amend horizon days, enabling TKS, enabling express move hours etc. You will need controller or administrator rights to activate or make certain changes. If the FC or GM do not have access, please contact support@d2o.

Express Move Hours Or Redistribute Hours to another department is a feature that allows you to move hours from one cockpit to one or more others.  

Click the clock-icon on the row of Other Hours, a popup will appear enabling you to remove hours from current Cockpit and adding them to other cockpits within the property. Always press on the + sign to choose the relevant department. Press on trash can if you want to delete. This function can only be used on past days.

All the hours you are moving/sending must be received somewhere. You need to end up at 0 hours (Hours left to Redistribute)

Please contact support@d2o.com to activate this.

If you want to see FTEs in schedule, a setting must be activated in the cockpit tool options. Please see more information in Schedule how to use this. 

FYI – Most tools are locked for users and are used to setup the cockpit once by d2o. Among things in the setup is the amount of decimals in the productivity. This setting is also affecting the number of decimals shown in the Budget & Forecast view. 

Recommendations & Best Practice