I live in Alaska, used to be in tourism lodging & ...

2008-08-20T17:46:00.000-04:00

I live in Alaska, used to be in tourism lodging & activities, and now do Lean implementations here. It is a fascinating industry. Huge corporations next to Mom & Pop shops. The large cruise/tour companies have their production systems down, but customer value is not maximized. The cruise companies manage quality and delivery by vertically integrating between ships, hotels and buses. While Lean is rare, they generally manage by Theory of Constraints. Bottlenecks are logistical transfer points (docks, airports, buses, sidewalk space), bathrooms and meal facilities. "Butts in beds" are the capacity metric, and "newlyweds and nearly deads" are the target market. For land-based tours, they operate on 44-person batches that fit in a bus. Activities are managed as voids or “scrum events” where the guest has 6 hours in Juneau to choose any activity they desire.
Job Instruction is done by supervisors who are usually returning staff from last season that come a week early for their training. Employees are usually Asian (ships with year-round workforce), East European (back of the house), and U.S. college/youth (front desk & servers). Land-based staff are on a 4-month hitch with meals and lodging provided and one week of training, including team building activities like painting the lodge. Job Methods and standard work are rigid on ships and vary on land assets. Managers are year-round logistics professionals who do asset maintenance, adjustments to job methods, new products, hiring & training in the “off season” which infers that each year is a batch. Managers annually struggle with port officials over docking times, and itineraries are adjusted accordingly. The focus during season is on turning beds and turning bus wheels to keep the batches moving.
The entire Alaska cruisetour system guarantees a comfortable yet mediocre experience because the customer voice is cut off from production. Cruise customers accounted for 20% of our guests, 50% of our cancellations, and over 75% of our complaints (80:20 Rule) because we couldn’t manage expectations. The booking channel can be long: Guest – Travel Agent – Tour Wholesaler - Cruise Company – Supplier, so there was never an opportunity to reconcile guest expectations with reality.
The guests choose their daily activities in the itinerary voids between logistical transfers (your choice of activities in Juneau was a “scrum event”). The successful delivery of peak experiences of your trip (majestic scenery or bear viewing) is a random occurrence based on weather and wildlife. From a customer value perspective, that’s pretty risky for a $4,000 trip of a lifetime. Ralph wisely chose the closest thing to a guaranteed peak experience with the 7-hour Tundra Wilderness Tour in Denali. If he chose the 3-hour Natural History Tour that goes one-third as far (which is marketed very similarly), he would have been underwhelmed at the 3 days it takes to do Denali. That’s a huge difference in customer value based on two sentences of marketing copy in a 48-page brochure.
Eric Downey
Alaska MEP, eric@ak-mep.org

I recently returned from an Alaska cruise as well ...

2008-08-07T08:18:00.000-04:00

I recently returned from an Alaska cruise as well and had many lean thought throughout my trip. My main thoughts centered on the operations of the ships crew. The action of every employee seemed to be well planned and though out...standardized! I had imagined that at each position there is well-documented and trained standard work and for each level of management/supervision there is well documented auditing. Is there anyone with cruise line operation experience that can comment on this? It would be interesting to know if there is a lean element to the operation of cruise lines.

Comments on Lean Insider: Flow in Alaska

I live in Alaska, used to be in tourism lodging & ...

I recently returned from an Alaska cruise as well ...