How a Global Hotel Chain Uses Hive to Organize its Refurbishments and Change Requests

Our customer is a major international hotel chain with multiple brands and thousands of properties around the world. The company is continually evolving, so change requests are part of the hotel chain’s everyday operations. Requests could be something as small as finding the correct microwave to fit the bar area of a hotel or more significant alterations, such as redesigning the layout of a gym and spa.

To manage these many and varied change requests, the company has a dedicated Design Standards team. The Design Standards team currently has more than 80 Hive users within the company, and the department is growing. Hive’s functionalities enable the team to keep processes simple and efficient. 

Let’s take a closer look at how the team uses Hive to manage changes across the network.

A simple yet effective change order workflow

The Design Standards team organizes its work in a central project, which it has named ‘Change Bulletin’. Here, it manages all its incoming change requests from submission to completion. 

Efficiency is essential for the hospitality network, so using Hive to streamline how people make change requests ensures time is not wasted with unnecessary information requests. 

The Design Standards team use a customized Hive Form to gather as much information as possible before starting a job. The customized Form asks requesters a series of questions and captures information from their responses. The team has set out a whole range of fields for the requester to fill in to ensure the job is channelled to the correct team members and that they have all the information they need to get up and running.

The detail contained on the customized Hive Form minimizes the need for back-and-forth information requests and includes several fields, for example:

• Type of request

• Change specifics

• Branding requests

• Document edits

• Region

• Exact product that a branch may want to use or replace

Handily, the Form sits within one of the hotel chain’s proprietary in-house platforms, providing easy access for anyone who needs to submit a change request, even if they are not in the core Hive user group. Ease of access is key in such a large, global operation. Requesters can also upload any supporting documents.

When a requester submits a new Form, an Action card is created, containing tasks that are intuitively assigned to the relevant team members. The company has set up the form to automatically add labels to Action cards. For example, labels based on the hotel brand, region, or branch are added, so the Action card can be routed to the relevant team.

The Design Standards team uses Portfolio View in Hive for full visibility over the status of jobs. To keep the workflow simple, the Design Standards team has just four basic status stages during a project’s lifecycle:

• Unstarted

• In Progress

• Custom progress, such as when the project is due to be completed (e.g., January 2024, Phase 1) 

• Completed

Managing change order approvals

The Design Standards team combines the efficiency of Hive with email to share documents and photos. Final reviews and approvals are currently all conducted through email, but users do have the option in Hive in the Proofing & Approvals app to complete the project sign-off. Team members can attach email threads and other information into the Action card to give further context to people working on that specific design change order.

Our global hotel chain customer is a great example of how the most complex and intricate of change order challenges across multiple brands and territories can be simplified and streamlined by using just the most basic functions of Hive.

Using Hive has enabled the Design Standards team to execute change requests more efficiently, so the hotel chain can focus on its core business of providing a premium hospitality experience to its customers around the world.