Summary

The Cost driver tab in the Labor cockpit is used for managing the department’s cost driver. Most hotel groups have corporate standards to be able to compare like for like, please verify with your head office before changing the settings.

Intended Users

Cockpit Owners

Instructions

A factor that causes a change in labor hours; i.e. what determines the department’s need for labor. E.g.

• Housekeeping – The cost driver is Room Nights (previous day). If more rooms are used, more hours are needed to clean rooms.
• Kitchen/Culinary – The cost driver is food revenue. As more food is produced, more hours are needed.

How to build up a cost driver − (requires controller or administrator user-rights)

Enter the Cost driver from the Tools menu

1. Define your cost driver label, what you want to call the driver.
2. Choose the source of the driver; i.e. department and segments
3. Define type driver; i.e. revenue, rooms, guests…
4. Define day – same day or previous day (only Breakfast and Housekeeping – previous day).
5. Define percentage; how much of the revenue/occupancy has an impact on the workload.
6. Tick Labor and Schedule to ensure visibility in cockpit and schedule
7. Click on the plus-sign (+) to add the cost driver. If you want to add drivers for information only, repeat the process in section B
8. If you want to add more sources to the cost driver like revenue from different outlets, repeat the process in section A and click the plus-sign (+) to confirm.

Don’t forget to Save/Update before exiting.

Your primary cost driver is marked with a star – all others are for information only.

The informational Cost Drivers can be displayed in the graph by clicking on the driver’s name in the legend below. Only one will show at the time.

The information graphs are not recommended as a primary for scheduling hours, but it can provide an indication to why there is a discrepancy to the main driver, for example many arrivals or departures.

Kitchen

If the property has several kitchens make sure they are linked to the correct outlet. If there is only one kitchen, select Total Food Revenue.

Arrivals, Departures & Stay Overs forecasting

We do not recommend to use arrivals and departures as primary drivers for Front Office and Housekeeping because this is not usually forecasted by the properties. Usually, most of the hours in front office are not spent on check-in or check-out but a lot of other administrative tasks.

PMI imports daily OTB for both past and future in addition to historic arrivals and departures from the respective Property Management Systems (PMS).

There is a feature that can be activated in PMI Live Room Forecast settings that will enable PMI to calculate a forecast for arrivals, departures and stay overs. It requires that the property have import of Arrival and departures from the PMS system.

PMI is using an algorithm that calculated out of the pickup in Live Room Forecast, how many Arrivals, Departures and Stay Overs the hotel has per day going forward. The algorithm takes into account the OTB information and then looks at historical data and seasons to calculate how many rooms will be Stay Over, arrival and departure per day in the cockpit. To activate this, please contact support@d2o.com.