Wireless in San Diego

High-Tech Housekeeping

Across town, executive housekeeper Irma Simental is seated at a computer screen in her basement office looking over the day's workload. It's a pretty slow day at the 73-room Pacific Terrace Hotel, in Pacific Beach, a Wednesday after the high season is over. Still, there will be a few new check-ins this afternoon, and several current guests have declined housekeeping service this morning or are checking out late. It's creating a backlog for the housekeepers who were assigned to turn over those rooms for new guests, and the front desk needs to be notified about which rooms will be ready and when. Worse yet, Pacific Terrace's 13 housekeepers are from Mexico and El Salvador and speak only Spanish. Although Simental is bilingual, her assistant manager, who is from Australia, can't speak Spanish, and most of the front-desk employees don't, either.

A year ago, situations like these caused big delays and staff frustration, but today, Simental is unfazed. She glances at the flashing blocks of color on her screen and calls Faye Cooper, the Australian assistant manager, on a push-to-talk wireless phone: "Gloria is backed up on the first floor--her rooms have Do Not Disturbs on them. Switch her over to help get the check-ins ready." From the other side of the hotel, Cooper answers, "Got it," and taps a series of commands onto a wireless-enabled Compaq iPaq handheld. Scarcely a minute later, the blocks on Simental's computer screen change colors, showing that Gloria De La Fuente has "logged out" of the first floor and is headed to a different floor to help get newly vacated rooms ready for the next guests.

Cooper's and De La Fuente's iPaqs, Simental's office computer, and the Pacific Terrace front-desk computers are all connected to a program called Just-in-Time Housekeeping Integrated, or JiHi, which is made by a Quebec City, Canada-based company called Palm Hospitality Technologies, and runs on a basic Wi-Fi network installed at the hotel. When De La Fuente arrives at work each morning, she logs on to her iPaq and sees her workload for the day in Spanish. As she works through each room, De La Fuente clicks through a series of screens prompting her to tidy the room, check the minibar, enter maintenance requests, and note if the guest has refused service or still has a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Any messages that she receives en route from Cooper appear on her screen in Spanish, while De La Fuente's own entries are immediately uploaded to the main system in English. Once she finishes a room, it appears on Cooper's iPaq as an inspection reminder. When Cooper is finished inspecting, the room appears on the front desk's computer screen as either occupied or ready for a new guest. Simental monitors the entire process from her office, or from her own iPaq as she supervises other activities around the hotel. With the built-in language translation and the always-on network of JiHi, the staff can seamlessly shift the workload around; maintenance and inventory requests are entered directly into the system, eliminating lots of data entry and paperwork. As an extra perk, hotel guests with wireless laptops can use the Wi-Fi network free of charge.

With her housekeeping staff the first in the United States to test the JiHi system, Simental was nervous about being a guinea pig. "When they told me they were bringing this in, I said, 'Ay! Why me?' But the girls caught on really fast--especially the ones I thought would be afraid of it." Now Simental says she would never go back. "I've worked everything from 250- to 1,400-room places and I can tell you, if we had this system then--wow!" Pacific Terrace's owner, Bartell Hotels, is now considering expanding JiHi to its six other hotels in the San Diego area. "I felt the biggest problem would be the fact that the housekeeping and maintenance staffs are not typically the most computer literate," says Pacific Terrace's general manager, J. Robert Kingery. "I have been floored by how the housekeeping staff took to it here." Simental smiles. "See? I told you."

Pharmacists On the Fly

Not knowing which guest rooms are ready for check-in is frustrating, to be sure. But that's nothing compared to trying to find ways to control spiraling health-care costs, improve hospital efficiency, and ensure that no sick patient ever experiences a bad drug interaction because of a data-entry mistake or delay. It's problems like these that San Diego's Sharp Healthcare is trying to address with its foray into wireless technology.