Operation management Essay

a) IntroductionThe guild that our group chose to study is City of Dreams Macau ( fuel pod), which is located in Macau Cotai coherent high mode. chew up is a diversified entertainment resort, which contains a rich set of entertainment, grand hotel accommodation, international cuisine, internation all(prenominal)y renowned brands as well as casino. Luckily, we found a passenger vehicle in entertainment and amaze department of this community to help us conduct an interview. The information of this carriage are as followsManager name Hu dTelephone number 66884314 military strength Theatre DirectorMain responsibilities All ticketing and frontline day-to-day operation of Atrium, Dancing Water, Hard Rock pool party, The Junyue MMA boxing matches, CUBIC ticketing and TABOO. take ins corporate goal, as stated by Lawrence Ho, is to become the tourist resort that makes Asian and even the global tourists to have multi-day stay, and to consolidate Macau as Asias leading va endt and touri sm center. assume locate in one of the most competitive area in Taipa, Macau. There are several entertainment resort hotels, much(prenominal) as Venetian, Sands Cotai Central, Galaxy Macau these competitors. COD has to keep its competitiveness to fight with them. So COD provides with some entertainments (like the house of Dancing Water, Dragon treasure, etc.)to attract the customers to come to COD to achieve corporate goal. In rescript to reform stave quality, entertainment and progress department overly cooperate with HR department to tenderise facts of life program to staff. Staffs can go for prepare as long as they are available. In corporate positioning, COD believes that it takes the advantage of providing something different than other competitors by implementing the differentiation strategy, for example, offering Dancing Water, Atrium to customers.COD also has high requirement on theentertainment activities they offered. In the past, COD once thought of curtain rais ing a cinema. However, COD imagines cinema is not very high-end and it impart low the elegance of COD, so COD rejects the consideration at last.b) Current OperationsThe authorized operation is to provide above entertainments to customers and make sure that the entertainment activities go smoothly. The private instructor has to measure ticketing and frontline workings keep running. In the ticketing, the manager said COD provide 6070%s ticket for internet denounce, and the rest of the ticket will provide to the agent like travel agencies, these agencies will sell the tickets to the group customers.The manager said COD wont overbook the ticket to get the maximum profit, because their shows are unique, and they care more or so the quality kind of than the quantity. They have to take-care some special needs person, providing convenience to them. COD tries to get a balance in the midst of making profit and remaining service quality. take cancellation & CompensationCOD sometimes fa ce fusss of show cancellation of Dancing Water and receive complaints from customers. Also, there whitethorn have some mistakes on the daily operation, so the customers will not satiate the services and have complaint with COD. For the compensation part, COD build a compensation standard to deal with customer complains. The universal approach is to take the customer complaint at first place, for example, ticket refund.However, if the compensation exceeds the companys standard, thence COD will take companys benefit at the first place (e.g. some customers will ask for airplane tickets refund and it will be transferred to higher train manager to determine the compensation level). Also, CODs management group will have meeting every week to discuss complaint affairs and set about to analyze whether it is due to guests vexatious or they have some shortcomings. If they think that they are not doing well, then they will think of ways and make improvement. decentalisationInstead of ce ntralization, COD tends to have decentralization because they believe that this is more essenceive. COD depend on staffs to help monitorthe trading operations of entertainment activities, so manager do not need to deliberately spend efforts on ensuring the operation of activity is smooth and they can focus on the overall operations. Staffs can forthwith go to their supervisor when they encounter problems. Also, manager will assign some employees who are in higher position to help monitor the lower level employees performance, as well as daily operation of activity.Supervisors directly ask the higher level staffs about the problems on work(e.g. do small circle of multitude exist and is there any employee they find that is difficult to get along with others ) in order to get a respectively good understanding about whats going on of daily operation.Reward systemThere is no satisfy system implementing now for the staff performance. gibe to the interview, there was a reward system before, employee who performs well will get free coupons of restaurants in COD, concert tickets, shopping tickets, or dancing water tickets, etc. as a bonus. However, it was cancelled due to the inefficiency.In the past, company let employees to vote for the best employee, and it causes problem that employees will vote to their friends, instead of having an evaluation about who is the best employee. COD think that it cannot reflect the truth and is meaningless. Therefore, COD now cancel the reward system and use the money to hold department activities, e.g. BBQ or order move back for all employees in the department. TrainingCOD use decentralization to let employees help maintain the current operations. Employees have to handle problems met by them. Therefore, training is an heavy way to ensure staffs quality and performance. The manager said the COD do very well in staff training, COD provides many training runways to the staffs to improve their work quality and skills. In usual time, they will post a form that includes all the training courses available along with corresponding time schedule, staffs can dissolve which training course to participate in accordance with their working time.COD will try to accommodate staffs working time to provide training courses. If it is not possible to arrange the suitable time for the staffs, regular work should be taken in the first place. Staffs can join the training courseafter finishing the work. In most of the time, COD wont enforce the staffs to participate training courses, staffs participate these training course voluntary.But there are some training courses that are compulsory to every staff according to CODs requirement. For example, in the future, COD will open a new show in CUBIC, and COD will arrange each employee to watch the CUBIC show at least once. So the staffs will do it about the show and what is the process of the show.c) Opportunity of improvementDecentralizationAlthough it is a good idea to let al l employees help monitor the daily operations of activities, so manager can focus more on the overall operations, there also some drawbacks caused by decentralization. According to the current operations, employees report to manager directly if they find problems on daily operations. It raises possible problems like (1) The quality of work may be poor because there is no clear responsibleness assigned to specific employee.The monitoring work conducted by employees may not be efficient. If there are problems that employees failed to recognize, manager may not know, because employees reporting is the entirely way for manager to get detail daily operating information from employees, it affects the operation activity in the short run if the problem is not negligible.(2) No regular meeting is required for manager and employees to exchange information. Regular meeting is an important way for reporting, if there is no such a meeting, employees are not encouraged to raise problems they fo und. They may first try to solve the problem when they find it, instead of reporting to their manager. Therefore, some problems may be hided and it causes bigger problems if the problem is crucial to the organization. Moreover, employees may not have a very good understanding of the companys strategy and may make inappropriate decisions without amply understanding the big picture.Reward systemNo reward system is implemented in current operations due to the former unsuccessful reward system. Employees individual performance is not linked with reward. Employees may be less motivated. Show cancellationIn the interview, we asked the COD manager What the most difficult problem that you had faced. The COD manager answered us is the show cancellation, which is a big problem for an entertainment resort. We can find some news about COD canceled the show. According to the news, COD suddenly cancel three shows of the house of Dancing Water. There are a lot of audiences already booked the tick ets in a enceintely a(prenominal) days ago, they received center from COD about the show cancel after they arrived Macau.This thing disturbs their plan. COD claim they need to cancel the shows because of the technical problems, and they will return the ticket fees, but they wont compensate the other loss, so audiences feel angry and disappointed with COD. This thing will hurt the protrude and reputation of COD, it can decrease customers that want to come to COD to watch the show, and decrease the profit. d) SolutionDecentralization1) Manager should provide training to staffs in order to strengthen their awareness of responsibility. Manager may also provide some guideline to staffs about what they should do if they encounter problems. Moreover, instead of fully depending on staff reporting, manager may take time to supervise daily operation if needed.2) Hold regular meetings for information exchange. With regular meetings, employees will have formal way to express their opinions or problems they found, so problems can be improved or solved in a more efficient way. Reward systemAccording to the interview, the former reward system is based on the vote of employees among each other, and this would easily cause about inequity. We recommend that COD may develop a reward system for a trial using different suffrage method. Instead of basing on the vote among employees, the department should create a criterion map for all the employees to be monitored by the supervisor. Once the employee performs great in some area, she/he will get a point in that part.The final differentiate is the cumulative score of every part. At the end of one period, the entire criterion chart should present thedegree of performance of the employees, which could be the grounds to decide which employee to get the rewards. See whether employees performance have improved under implementing the new reward system by making evaluation from period to period. If the result is good, then company sho uld consider implementing a reward system in order to encourage employees for better performance in the long-run.This kind of solution will abstract some bias of the evaluation. Not basing on the evaluation among employees, monitored by supervisor will be more just to use the reward system.Show cancellationWe think out some suggestions for the COD to solve this problem. (1) Develop a contingency plans. The staffs of COD must make advance notice about the show cancellation message to the customers, and then arrange the customers to return the tickets, getting back the fees. This can mitigate the dissatisfaction of customers and reduce other unnecessary loss. However, sometimes we cannot expect accidents, which are some aspects we cannot control, and it is hard to tell the customers early.(2) Second, open the other facilities of the hotel. Customers come to COD to enjoy the service and entertainment, and if I was one of them, I dont want just go back home because of the cancellation of the shows I want to watch. So COD can open some facilities to these customers to ensure they excuse have an awesome experience in COD. For instance, Venetian has the In the other hand, COD can give these customers equivalent coupons, and they can spend some time in COD, and use these coupons to buy anything in the hotel.Of course, this method needs the cooperation among many involved departments. (3) And the last is to prepare a rilievo show. If a show has to be cancelled, customers can choose to watch the backup show. But not every customer wants to watch another show because they come for shows that they want to watch, and the cost of backup show is not cheap. Therefore, customers can also ask for refund and buy the ticket next time with a discount. e) ImplementationAfter communicating the suggestions we made for the manager, he said that implementing our solution to the company right now was not practical. Theirdecisions need to be made based on some professional analysis. H owever, he listened to our solution and gave his own comments about the effect of those solutions For the decentralization part, he thinks holding regular meetings is one of the possible way for staffs to raise problems they found, but managers always need to manage so many things and may not have enough time to do that. For the reward system part, we suggested that to build a new reward system using different voting method.However, according to the manager, biases also exist if using this method. However, there will be two potential problems 1 There is a grey area between just and unjust, and once the supervisor decides the reward, its complicated to say the manager will be definitely just to everyone. The bias might exist still 2 The supervisor has many things to deal with there might be some overlook in employees performance, which will be hard to monitor all the aspects.For the show cancellation part, sometimes advance announcement is not possible because of the suddenly occurre d error. In other way, COD should consider the cost problem if they want to satisfy customers by providing them equivalent coupons. The cost problem also exists in the back-up show suggestion.ConclusionAfter the interview, we can get some information about the operations of the entertainment fields in the COD. In the daily operations, it depends on the staffs to maintain the operations and solve the problems. COD also provides some training courses for staffs to participate, but these training courses are optional, which means not every staff has enough skills to handle the difficult level operation problems.One of the CODs selling points is its rattling(prenominal) shows, these shows attract a lot of people to come. But sometimes, because of some reasons, COD have to cancel the show, which means they need some good back up plans to appease the angry of customers, and try to decrease the loss. COD is a big entertainment resort hotel in Macau. From the interview, we can find out tha t COD real do a good job in its operation.