Hospitality Business: Front Office Business Continuity Exercise - Assignment Example

Every organization should be ready anytime such that they can have the capa to tackle such problems when they occur. This is through advanced training programs offered to the employees and other responsible staff. Another measure is to have mock exercises on various disasters, which might occur in the organization. Immediately when the system goes down, stakeholders should be made aware of the problem. They will be the first people to give top management procedur1es and what should be done. The management team will be made aware of the same problem at the same time they receive the response from the stakeholders on what to do next (Bollar & Goss-Turner 305).

This is because they are the responsible people who will take on the procedure of solving the problem. The other employees try to adapt other means to keep the operations moving in the front office. The management team should be informed about the problem in the system such that they can propose immediate measures to be taken as the problem waits to be solved. Finance department should be informed about the problem immediately. This is because they are used to the receipts generated by the computer before the system went down.

This is important such that they will be able to accept the manual receipts from the customers without any problem. In addition, the finance department should be aware of the problem such that they switch to the manual system when issuing the receipts to the customers. Staff members who are in the kitchen department should be informed of the problem. This is to enable them to accept the manual receipts when serving the clients and avoid overcrowding due to many questions on clients about the receipts.

Another crucial department to be informed of the problem is the stores department. This is because they frequently issue materials to be in the organization and it is a busy department in the organization. The department will have been used to requisitions and receipts generated by the computer, and they will have many problems in accepting the manual requisitions and receipts if they are not alerted immediately. Employees who help the customers to check into the rooms should be made aware of the problem.

This is because the customers will present to them the manual receipts which are not used to as they have been using the computer generated receipts. If these employees are not alerted immediately when the problem occurs, they will be having many problems when dealing with the customers leading to delays when serving customers. For those customers who require a copy of their folio, the first thing is to inform them about the problem. They should be made to understand that it is an emergency and some measures are being taken to solve the problem.

This will make the customers understand the situation in which the organization is undergoing. Instead of the folio generated from the computer, which is used to, they should be given the manual one. This is because they might need to present a copy of it in their places of work or to their various employers as a prove of what they spent. In addition, these customers should be advised to pick their folios after some time when the system has been updated. For this to work, their details should be captured in a certain file such that they will be used in updating the system.

Immediately when the system goes down, every transaction done in the organization should be noted down. All the information noted down and the receipts issued manually to customers should be kept safely. This is because all these information will important and necessary when updating the system when it comes back to normal. When the system comes up, all the information, which were captured manually should be fed one by one accurately into the system (Bollar and Goss-Turner 97). The information entered into the system warrants subjection to thorough scrutiny to minimize errors that may accrue while entering data.

This will eliminate any error, which might occur and bring the operations back to normal. Information for every customer should be entered into the system even for those who have checked out of the organization. This will avoid confusion, which might occur when the data for those who have checked out is not captured. Confusion can be exchange of the customers bills being assign to others as they are entered into the system. This should be monitored because customers might end up paying higher or lower bills.

Those who will pay higher bills than their actual bills will be discouraged, and might not come back to the organization next time thus prompting loss to the organization. On the other hand, when the customers pay lower bills than the required, it will lead to a loss to the organization, as they will not earn money as per the services they offered to the customers. Information for transactions done every day should be recorded separately in a separate book for each customer. This will make work easier when copying them to update the system.

Everyday transactions should be recorded, and balanced well to avoid errors. Before updating the system, an audit should be performed in all the manual transactions done in all departments. This is to make sure that data to be transferred to the system is accurate and free from any errors. An internal audit should be done and eternal audit to finalize the process. External auditors should be outsourced to verify the auditing done by the internal auditors. This is because the employees might influence the internal auditors such that they can manipulate results of the audit (Bollar and Goss-Turner 157).

It might be difficult for the organization to recover the information lost during the occurrence of the problem. This is because they might not be having any data backup for the information in the system. To avoid such problems in the future, the organization should have data backup for all the information and software used in the organization. This avoids customers' data at the same time organization's information being lost. In addition, it will be easier to recover and update the system back to normal in case such problem occurs in the organization.

This will enable the organization to spend a short time and less money when updating the system back to normal. Work Cited Bolla, Michael and Goss-Turner, Steven. Human Resource Management in the Hospitality Industry: A Guide to Best Practice. United Kingdom: Routledge, 2013.