Just months after launching operational standards platform S.P.A.R.K., third-party hotel management company Aimbridge Hospitality has rolled its proprietary Labor Insight & Forecasting Tool out across its portfolio. LIFT combines labor data from multiple systems into one connected view, giving property and finance leaders a common reference for planning labor daily, weekly and monthly.
LIFT applies data science and AI-assisted forecasting to labor planning to provide hoteliers with a more precise, real-time view of staffing needs. According to the company, the right staffing levels protect the guest experience that drives repeat bookings and occupancy, while smarter scheduling improves GOP flow-through and helps reduce associate turnover.
The platform connects the three core pieces of labor management—forecasting, scheduling and execution—into a single view, so property and regional teams can see where labor and demand are drifting out of alignment before they actualize. This lets leaders adjust staffing proactively, before a property is over- or understaffed, protecting profitability without compromising the guest experience. LIFT leverages existing property-system data and automatically updates it to make sure the information remains current.
Labor and Forecasting
“Labor is our largest cost, and for us to be able to sit in front of an owner with a tool that is providing us with more predictability than not has been a gamechanger for us in terms of being able to more accurately schedule our on-property resources in real time,” Aimbridge Chief Information Officer Keryn McNamara told Hotel Management. While acknowledging a “monetary value” in terms of savings, she sees additional value in the “confidence in our data and our ability to put forth a product into the hands of our operators that is making their jobs easier.”
The product, she continued, is built within a platform that Aimbridge’s operators are already used to accessing on a daily basis. “[It was] important for us to not put forth yet one more application or system in front of them,” McNamara said. “But building this product inside of an application that the teams are already used to has really boosted confidence in terms of what we are able to provide to them, and added that additional value up above and beyond any monetary value.”
“The amount of data that we ingest on a daily basis is immense—based on our scale and our size and the fact that we have cross-brand [and] cross-vertical data,” McNamara said. “We are ingesting, on a daily basis, data from our property-management systems [and] data from UKG, which is our time and attendance system. … We are leveraging both historical and current data to synthesize all of that into this predictive formula, which has really allowed us a greater level of insight.”
Results from the company’s recent pilot were positive, McNamara said, with participating hotels reporting measurable labor productivity gains, especially in housekeeping and laundry. “As you can imagine, with the number of brands that we support, many of them have different requirements relative to length of stay and the time at which a room needs to be cleaned,” she noted. “The tool accounts for all of those intricacies,
The hotels also reported improved accuracy in scheduling and reduced instances of overscheduling, bringing planned labor and actual labor into closer alignment. “This tool is actually providing our associates with a more accurate and prescriptive schedule than what they've had in the past, and I think it's … reinforcing the trust that we have with our associates and that they have with us.”
Next Steps
Aimbridge will continue refining the platform based on feedback from operators in the field, and McNamara said the next focus would be on food and beverage. The new capabilities will rely on the same methodologies, she noted—“and that's an aspect I'm really excited about because, candidly, scheduling a food and beverage is much more unique and [involves] different data points than [overseeing] your traditional room.”