Starwood

Sales and Operations Planning at Starwood

Video Case Analysis

Business or personal travel often means staying overnight in a hotel. When you arrive

you may be greeted by a doorman or valet to assist you with your luggage and the front desk

staff awaits your check-in. Behind the scenes, housekeeping, maintenance and culinary are also

preparing for your stay. Making a reservation gives the hotel notice of your plan to stay, but even

before your trip is ever conceived, the hotel is staffed and ready. (Krajewski, Ritzman &

Malhotra, 2010) This is possible because of a process called sales and operations planning. Sales

and Operations planning is performed in every organization to some degree, Starwood is no

different. Starwood Resorts is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with

approximately 750 locations around the globe. Plans like this need to find the right level of

customer service and maintain the workforce and cost control to allow the company to achieve

profit expectations. This planning process involves all areas of the organization, while some

‘departments’ are more front and center for the planning process to be successful all areas should

be represented. At what points in the planning process would you expect accounting/finance,

marketing, information systems and operations to play a role? The best answer for this question

is, in my opinion, all points of the process. For the process to be successful all departments

should have some involvement. As the case states, “typically, the director of human resources

determines the staffing mix needed across divisions such as food and beverage service, rooms,

engineering, Six Sigma, revenue management and accounting”, even though the human

resources determines the staffing mix the sales and operations planning process can be

considered a part of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) process. A sub question that can be

asked is “what inputs...