Mr. Weissman

Executive Leadership

Life-Cycle Management Tools for the Hospitality Industry

By Arthur Weissman, President and CEO, Green Seal, Inc.

Defining Life Cycle Inventory, Assessment, Costing, and Management

While Environmental Management Systems (EMS) have been around in the hospitality industry since the early 1990s, there is still a lot ambiguity and variety as to how they are being used. Three reasons for this include:

• a lack of clarity as to which facility operations should be monitored,

• who is responsible for the monitoring, and

• the cheapest and most consistent means to assess, analyze, and track nonfinancial performance goals as requested by investors and clients.

The list of expected performance goals seems daunting: environmentally responsible building design; energy and water efficiency and conservation; environmentally preferable purchasing; waste management and recycling; biodiversity preservation, conservation, and restoration; renewable energy investment; local sourcing of consumables; climate-conscious landscape design; local community engagement; and high quality competitive service delivery are just a few. Life-Cycle Assessment and Management go beyond the traditional use of EMS to provide data to report on environmental compliance. By integrating EMS policy systems with Hospitality Management Software you and your employees can stretch beyond an organizational mindset of environmental and social compliance and begin to benchmark and analyze your performance from a wide array of touch-points within your service delivery systems.

Hospitality has traditionally used Life Cycle Costing or Input/Output Analysis (which primarily focus on pricing) to calculate environmental performance metrics. A limitation of this approach, however, is that clients' and investors' experiences with your brand are not only the bed they sleep on or the golf course they helped construct. Segregating and choosing your environmental projects based on material cost only can create a very dangerous split between your brand's corporate social responsibility strategy and the real-time myriad of interactions between your employees and external groups. Such a separation can lead to higher levels of brand risk when compared to other chains where day-to-day operations are fully integrated into corporate environmental and social management plans.

An alternative approach is to utilize a Material per Service Unit analysis to establish metrics by which to evaluate your facilities' non-financial performance. This methodology seeks to measure all the material and energetic requirements of a service's life cycle, beginning from the collection of raw material and ending with the disposal or re-processing of the waste generated from delivery of the service.1 Rather than pricing, the primary unit of measurement is kilograms, with data sources classified into five different categories: energy, abiotic and biotic materials, air, and soil disturbance (from agriculture or forestry practices). This method of analysis can put property or policy managers in a better position to evaluate all the inputs or "touch points" along a service delivery chain. This type of Life-Cycle Assessment can also ease your ability to compare and contrast a variety of service solutions by concentrating on the material costs of providing the same service by different means.

For example, preliminary research and baseline data being used for the development of a standard for restaurants and food services by Green Seal includes specific questions that cover the following "service delivery" operational areas: purchase records, waste generation, water use, energy use, transportation use, disposal, food sourcing, equipment, cleaning, and furnishings and linens. Data being collected from these operational areas at participating facilities will be used to calculate the following impacts: water use, energy conservation, carbon consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, energy used to develop and deliver food services, water body acidification, ozone depletion, and nutrient inputs into the environment. By beginning to track this data for touch points in the food-service supply chain, stakeholders in the standard development process are hoping to tie their corporate environmental management plans more closely to their day-to-day facility operations.

Integrating Life-Cycle Management into Your Brand

Managing the records for such a diverse array of operational areas within any service industry can be labor intensive if the records are stored in paper filing or separate management software systems that are frequently designed and managed by separately staffed departments. There are software tools available now, however, that if employed throughout your property, can greatly reduce the amount of time and effort expended by your staff to help manage the asset life-cycle of your various facilities and the hospitality services they provide. The development of hospitality management systems (HMS) over the past two decades has streamlined many hotel management administrative operations, including the management of the front desk, back office, multiple properties, need for VIP guest tracking, point-of-sale operations, informational kiosk management, booking, and special-event planning. As an extension or add-on to HMS systems, some properties are also providing carbon footprint calculators or energy monitoring modules to enable clients and executives to track energy consumption on site.

But again, adding extra applications for each non-financial performance objective can become costly and duplicative for managers working with tight margins. Having all your performance information centralized on one database can greatly enhance the efficiency and quality of service delivery, assessment, and service modification. Similar efforts to consolidate data collection and analysis in the real estate, healthcare, education, and financial service industries have evolved into what is now termed integrated workflow management systems (IWMS). Through integrating project management, facility maintenance management, and leasing management, IWM systems collate a much larger range of data than HMS or single purpose add-on software tools can. According to Gartner's 2 research, widespread adoption of IWMS is partly due to increased need for compliance with Sabarnes-Oxley, emerging adoption and market competition based on automated workflow management best practices, and the growth of integrated work environments where inter-departmental collaboration for facility management is the norm.

There are some IWMS product suites now available that have specifically incorporated environmental metrics and LEED criteria into pre-set performance goals, like TREES software by TRIRIGA, Inc. But many IWMS systems that specialize in integrating fiscal and non-financial data collection can be adapted to include specific environmental performance goals developed internally by companies.

Employee Adoption of Your Brand's Reporting Tools

Having your procurement, human resource, and financial management systems available at the touch of the keyboard can save your staff and executive team a lot of headaches and time in developing your sustainability reports and marketing materials. But before you send out an RFP for additional software modules for your current HMS, or consider purchasing an IWMS, the need and interest for this software should be established among your staff, otherwise the software will be a lost investment and drain on your current operations.

It's best to begin with a sustainability or green team that can develop your brand's or property's environmental mission and goals. This team should represent the various functional departments at your property or within your brand. By having this diversity, specific and concrete activities to support each environmental goal can be established and later incorporated into your computerized management system in a way that suits the team members' specific departmental reporting interests. This will also establish a cross-functional group of your employees that can utilize the workflow management tools to forecast and track their operations for environmental performance metrics in all departments (Admin, Engineering, Housekeeping, Purchasing, Marketing, etc.)

Once the property's and/or brand's environmental mission and goals are established, your green team members can then go back to their departments to develop management plans that support the environmental goals through an analysis of the departments' current practices regarding energy, water, waste management, and environmentally responsible purchasing. Once these department-specific management plans are in place, customized screens or dashboards can be developed for department staff that will have access to your computerized management system. These computerized dashboards can be formatted to show only the performance monitoring and reporting forms that are of interest to the staff member inputting data or developing reports.

Once your environmental and social management plans are finalized, you may begin the selection of additional software tools for your hotel management system or selection of an IWMS. To ease the testing and adoption process, it's best to begin by testing, training, and integrating the new software within the departments that will be using the system for report generation or analysis, and then train the groups that will be using it to input data. For example, the Engineering department would be a good place to begin rolling out the software, followed by Administration and Marketing, and ending with housekeeping and Front Desk operations. Once one department understands the system, they can then become champions or go-to helpers for other staff who will not use it as often.

Environmental Audits and Monitoring

Once you have begun using your new system, its analytical tools and printed assessments can be used to provide sustainability reports to your investors, clients, and, in some cases, third-party environmental auditors. The primary benefit, however, of using workflow management software is that it provides baseline and monitoring information that can be tracked over a series of months or years, depending on the timeline your green team agrees upon for accomplishing your environmental goals. Having this one location for your brand's or property's performance data will reduce overhead administration costs and staffing needs related to its management. It will also enable you and your colleagues to assess various means of providing your hospitality services and to adjust your strategic goals based on a Material per Service Unit analysis rather than the traditional I/O models, making your facility or brand even more flexible during market volatility.

The most important function of Life-Cycle Assessment tools, however, is their ability to broaden the scope of your brand's or property's environmental performance evaluation and quickly identify which areas can use improvement. By consolidating this information internally, you will be enabling your staff to realize and articulate your sustainability goals.

References:

1 Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto ( 2008) "MIPs On-Line " http://www.sll.fi/luontojaymparisto/kestava/mips-onlinein-english accessed Oct. 13, 2008.

2 Gartner, Inc. (2006) "Magic Quadrant for Integrated Workplace Management Systems 2006" http://www.planon.nl/web/file?uuid=35edbf80-1628-47f6-8c86-61d77019aab4&owner=4b103102-5636-4863-9e68783694956eb8 Accessed Oct. 10, 2008

Preliminary research for this article was done by Rani A. Bhattacharyya, Executive Assistant to the CEO, Green Seal, Inc. She holds an M.S. in Recreation Parks and Tourism Management from Western Illinois University and has assisted rural communities in the United States and internationally with tourism development projects.

Arthur B. Weissman, Ph.D., is President and CEO of Green Seal, Inc. He has experience in environmental science, policy, and standard-setting in public and private sectors. He has led the non-profit's resurgence as a force to make the economy more sustainable. He served as an international convener in developing the ISO 14000 standards for environmental labeling, and was the first Chair of the Global Ecolabeling Network. He has developed policy for the Superfund waste-cleanup program, served in the U.S. Senate as a Science Fellow, and worked for The Nature Conservancy. Mr. Weissman can be contacted at 202-872-6400 or aweissman@greenseal.org Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.