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As the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Harrah’s Metropolis Casino and Hotel, Brad Hirsch was faced with the key decision of how to implement lean principles within a single facility while maintaining sufficient coverage of key service areas. Mr. Hirsch had previous experience of lean implementation at three casinos with over 4,000 employees; however, during those Kaizen events he was able to pull staff from other hotel areas to ensure sufficient coverage of daily operations. At the new Metropolis property, Mr. Hirsch needed to determine whether to proceed with implementing lean principles and tools with an expertise-based process improvement team or the traditional route with the casino employees learning and implementing processes from the ground up.
Mr. Hirsch has several alternatives to consider and weigh to determine the best solution for this stand-alone property, its 600 employees and thousands of customers. He must take into consideration the pros and cons of each of these alternatives and analyze how these decisions will affect not only the processes within the organization, but the employees and customers as well. If he brings in experts to apply lean principles and tools within Harrah’s Metropolis Casino, he would not have to train line employees to analyze and improve processes themselves and would not experience the temporary loss of productivity that traditional lean implementations have. He could save time and money by selecting this approach; however, he would lose the momentum and emergent effects of the employees and activities involved in the Kaizen events. This lack of employee ownership of the new processes and procedures from lean could be a problem if continuous improvement projects are something the organization wants to build itself on. If he selected the traditional route involving the casino employees, he faces the challenge

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