A Ground-Up Approach To Innovation

How Marina Bay Sands Ignited a Movement for Continuous Innovation

Beginning his work life as a kitchen apprentice in 1997, Christopher Toh learnt valuable lessons from the high-pressure world of professional kitchens.

Over the next decade, his career would take him through the “veins and arteries” of luxury hospitality – from Butler, Concierge, Food & Beverage, and Housekeeping, to being a Front Office Manager – before he entered the world of data analytics to improve the guest experience.

Informed by this “boots on the ground” experience, he was one of the founding members of IGNITE, a ground-up innovation movement which started at Marina Bay Sands in 2018.

Data-heavy solutions were a “difficult sell” to operational teams because they appeared disconnected to team members’ daily reality when it first kicked off prior to 2020, says Christopher, who today is Executive Director for customer experience (CX) analytics and process improvement at Marina Bay Sands.

However, by translating raw data into operational insights over the years, the IGNITE team – now led by Huang Eng Ghim, Associate Director – Process Improvement at Marina Bay Sands – has transformed the integrated resort’s innovation culture, he notes. “People are making decisions based more on data than anecdotes,” he notes.

From Excel Files to Digital Dashboard

One example is the housekeeping “crash programme”. Previously, supervisors manually tracked deep-cleaning tasks for up to 1,850 rooms at the hotel by manually updating multiple Excel files – a process prone to human error.

By moving this to a digital dashboard late last year, Marina Bay Sands reclaimed over 10,000 non-productive hours per year. These “re-purposed hours” now allow staff to focus more on guest engagement.

Separately, a real-time dashboard also helps optimise manpower usage in a country always facing a labour crunch.

By matching the rostered bellmen based on section with their last-known assigned job and location, dispatchers can now assign luggage deliveries or collections based on proximity rather than returning to the lobby for every job.

This reduces unnecessary movement and waiting times for lifts, transforming a manual process into a well-oiled machine. Small wins, informed by data generated near real-time.

A New Way Forward

Like many stories of innovation, the IGNITE programme was born out of a need. It began when Marina Bay Sands’ leadership found that traditional process improvement courses such as Lean Six Sigma and Kaizen were too heavily rooted in manufacturing to fit the needs of a customised luxury integrated resort.

There’s no one-size-fits-all, the team shared. So, the pioneer batch of innovators curated a “bite-sized” version that busy operations teams could immediately apply.

The resulting framework was the IGNITE acronym: Identify (objectives and scope), Generate (unearthing root causes), Navigate (learning available resources), Initiate (moving to solutions), Transform (managing the project), and Evaluate (measuring success).

Unlike academic courses, IGNITE workshops ranging from half-day “Essentials” for supervisors to three-day “Elevate” deep dives force team members to look at problems through four specific lenses - the customer, the team member, revenue and cost drivers, and process flow.

“The intent of the programme is to ensure that there’s a bottom-up approach to innovation,” says Alok Atri, Vice-President of financial planning and analysis, another founding member of the IGNITE effort.

“It is through such learning journeys and engagements that this culture of innovation and process improvement gets built over time,” he adds – and not forgetting a very important element of collaboration with all the various business units as everything is intertwined within the resort.

A Cultural Shift: Data as the New Foundation

The most significant impact of IGNITE has been a fundamental shift in the Marina Bay Sands innovation culture. In the past, hospitality decisions were often made based on “the olden days” mentality.

IGNITE replaced this with a bottom-up approach, where frontline staff are nominated as “change ambassadors” to solve the very problems they encounter daily.

This shift is rooted in data democratisation. Instead of simply relying on analysts who may not interpret what the operational data means, the IGNITE team acts as “translators”.

The team works with departments to “clean” operational data from systems like Opera, a property management software for hotels. Data is presented in structured, digestible dashboards that allow team members to make informed business decisions, often in real-time.

One such improvement is the integrated resort’s room amenity system, which manages the delivery of thousands of pastries and chocolates, for example.

Once a nightmare of manual Excel sheets and copy-pasted e-mails, this has evolved into an in-house Web application that provides live job tracking, automated report generation for finance, and real-time inventory management for the main kitchens. This is a good example of how multiple departments come together to find a solution addressing every need.

The Power of Incremental Improvements

A core philosophy of IGNITE is that all improvements matter. The programme shies away from seeking only big, grand solutions; instead it celebrates incremental growth.

A striking example involves the portable cans of fuel used to keep food warm at buffets. By replacing the container with a transparent one, staff can now see how much fuel is left and reuse the containers instead of replacing them.

This change was suggested by team members who had to discard half-used cans because they did not know if there was enough fuel in them to last an event. It now saves Marina Bay Sands approximately S$200,000 a year.

This “small wins” mindset ensures that even the busiest teams feel empowered to challenge the status quo without needing a massive budget.

Beyond a One-Off Win

Each year, an event celebrates the innovations at Marina Bay Sands that make a difference. The IGNITE Forum, which showcased key projects, also brings together team members to check out the latest in technologies, such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. It’s also another reminder of the continuous effort for improvement.

“There is no one project where you just complete in three to six months... then close shop,” Christopher explains, emphasising that the true value lies in the “never-ending continuous involvement and journey each project has”.

This philosophy ensures that as customer patterns, age groups, and seasons change, the resort’s operations evolve and enhance alongside them. It encourages Team Members to constantly ask “what's next?” rather than resting on the laurels of a completed project.

By embedding this ethos deeply in the “veins and arteries” of its operations, it hopes to have created the enduring DNA for innovation in a constantly changing hospitality sector.