FEATURE – Our editor attends a Lean Day at Dreamplace Hotels & Resorts in Tenerife. In this report, he shares his thoughts about team building, following up on improvements, and yokoten.

Words: Roberto Priolo

There is something about going back to the same gemba time and time again. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of returning to Dreamplace Hotels & Resorts in Tenerife, Canary Islands, for what my colleague Oriol Cuatrecasas had described to me as a “macro–Lean Day.”

I have been visiting this company for years, and I am endlessly impressed by their enthusiasm and deep commitment to continuous improvement.

During the Lean Day (there are around three each year), teams from across Dreamplace’s five hotels gather to share progress and results from a wide range of improvement projects, each tackling a different aspect of operations. What made the May event so “macro” was that several organizations from mainland Spain – from paint manufacturers to bakeries and food companies – attended, hoping to get inspired and learn from what is now an advanced example of a lean enterprise.

A recurring theme throughout the day was how continuous improvement, when grounded in standards and cross-team collaboration, can drive both efficiency and quality – at a time when the hotels face challenges ranging from high employee turnover to new data regulations that threatened to substantially increase guest check-in times.

One standout figure came shortly after. “In 2024, we’ve saved 1.1 million minutes of non-value-added work,” one of the directors proudly reported. The initial goal was just 10,000 minutes per hotel – which already sounded like a lot to me. Contributing to this outstanding result was the way knowledge travels across hotels within Dreamplace (where yokoten – or knowledge sharing – is a key part of the company ethos). Recently, for example, the team at Hotel Gran Tacande taught their successful and highly efficient cleaning standard to their peers at Hotel Tagoro. This is, without a doubt, one of the most beneficial things about having an organization that encourages collaboration and learning across teams (and where leaders are even known to rotate between hotels to facilitate the transfer of knowledge).

THE A3s

Presentations of the improvements made by the different teams – as summarized in the A3s they put up on the walls of the large room housing the Lean Day – took most of the morning. Among the most memorable success cases was the A3 on buffet improvement at Hotel Tagoro, which serves 1,500 meals per day. Customer expectations for the buffet had been increasing over time, and the kitchen’s spaghetti diagram looked incredibly messy, prompting a radical rethink. “We took the preparation out of the kitchen and in front of the customer,” the hotel’s Kitchen Manager explained. “The new layout and workflow cut service time per meal from 320 to 260 minutes and slashed internal movement by 4 km per shift. Quality also improved 3%, and our goal is to get to 10% increase.”

Another team tackled water waste (a huge problem on an island experiencing a water crisis), saving 11,000 liters annually by using treated pool water in gardens. In technical services, a clever redesign of maintenance carts and better departmental coordination enabled 24 monthly preventive checks – avoiding unnecessary room changes and customer complaints. Meanwhile, an A3 on allergies revealed a critical knowledge gap: that people didn’t know what was in the dishes the restaurant was serving. The solution was to introduce standardized menus, provide training, and give customers a clear point of contact for all things allergies (“the person with the tall hat”). This helped reduce complaints by 10%. Even sensory quality wasn’t ignored: at Hotel Tigotan, the team tried to improve the flavor of the food, raising the score from 4.10 to 4.30 (out of 5) thanks to menu standardization and a more varied food offering.

One of the things that struck me was that, after each presentation, change agent Miguel Delgado provided a little summary of the A3 and highlighted what its key lean lesson was (“This reminds us of the importance of gathering data”). I found this to be a fantastic way to contextualize each improvement.

Context is everything and, as commendable and impressive as the results were, it’s important not to lose sight of the real goal. As General Director Marco Lopez put it after all the teams had finished presenting their improvements: “It’s easy to obsess over the minutes we can save, but remember that the point for us is not to cut people – it’s to let them create more value.” Creating value, not just saving for the sake of saving.

10 YEARS OF LEAN

During the break, as teams from the different hotels gathered around flipcharts to decide what improvements they would commit to next (they’d present them at the next Lean Day), I caught up with Marco. I started by sharing an observation with him: each time I return, it feels like he and the rest of the leadership team are stepping back more, allowing the teams to truly take center stage. Beyond a few opening remarks and the occasional comment, he and his fellow directors had spent the morning quietly listening to the presentations. He confirmed that this was entirely intentional – a conscious decision that reflects the company’s long-standing strategy to empower people at every level.

“We decided early on that improvement had to come from the teams themselves. In a hotel with 1,000 employees, you can’t expect just a group of 20-30 people to take care of the entire guest experience. Everyone has to be part of this,” he said. This understanding has shaped the different stages of the Dreamplace lean journey: the formation of subgroups to empower every employee, the shift toward cross-functional teams, and the long learning curve of discovering how to solve problems together.

Marco was candid about the difficulties the company encountered when it came to sustaining change. “Improving and committing to the standards is hard,” he admitted. “Sustainment is always a challenge. The tendency is always to comply for a while before slipping back.” That led them to focus on measuring adherence – first informally, then systematically. They are currently at 85% – a percentage that would be unacceptable in manufacturing but that is quite reasonable in a service environment, where there is a lot of variation outside of the company’s control (tourism trends, weather, etc).

But the good level of adherence doesn’t make the team complacent. With standards more stable, they began building their “House of Standards” – a structured way to track not only what the best way to perform a job is, but how long it takes, who does it, and with what resources. “It gives us context. We finally have a repository for all our standards, a way to measure and compare how we work, and more importantly, improve them consistently,” Marco explained.

The plan is now to keep advancing, with consolidation being the number one focus to ensure there is a solid system supporting everybody’s work across the five hotels.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN

At the end of the day, after everyone in the room had voted for their favorite A3 (a nice way to recognize the efforts of the teams, while creating some healthy competition), the guests were asked to share some feedback of their own. This is where the power of Yokoten becomes even more evident. The invited organizations, which come from a variety of industries, took turns sharing their highlights and the elements of the “Dreamplace way” that struck them the most.

Albert from Grupo Simon (a large company specialized in lighting technology solutions) said: “What impressed me the most was seeing how interconnected the different teams are, despite having different areas of focus and daily routines. To me, that really reinforces the message that Lean Thinking has the power to build bridges between different worlds.”

For Mauricio Paredes Dondo, Operations Director at paint manufacturer Cromology, the highlight of the day was the transparency that permeates Dreamplace at all levels. “It’s truly admirable, and it speaks volumes of how difficult it is to hide things in a lean organization. The fact that everyone can – in fact, is encouraged – to question and challenge ideas and raise problems is the biggest learning for me. I am fully aware of the cultural work that’s behind that,” he said.

Speaking briefly, Oriol Cuatrecasas commended everyone’s effort and jokingly said that we lean people are like “Martians”, in that we think and act differently than everybody else, in a world where lean is not the predominant management approach (yet).

José Calvo from Viscofan, a manufacturer of casings for meat products, also had some thoughts to share.  “What really impressed me is the culture of this organization, how deeply rooted it is in everyone – from a waiter to a general director. We have worked very hard on the culture at Viscofan, and this is where we want to get. People at Dreamplace take ownership of problems and it shows in their results. The fact that they take time every three months to get together and look back at the improvement work they have done and at the benefits it’s generated is very inspiring to me,” he said.

It was then the turn of the team from Hotel Atenea in Mataró, near Barcelona, to share their feedback. One of them stood up and said: “We have only just begun our own transformation, running some experiments in our kitchen. Seeing the work that’s taken place here and the effort it requires gives me an idea of what to expect. More importantly, it gives me an idea of what’s possible.”

Funny thing how Yokoten works. It can teach us, it can inspire us, and it can even intimidate us sometimes. But it never leaves us indifferent. One thing’s for sure: that so many diverse organizations are eager to learn from Dreamplace speaks volumes about the company’s growing role as a benchmark for lean excellence in hospitality.

I wanted to get some more input from visiting businesses. So, before heading to the airport, I walked up to Biel Bufort and Sara Granados from food company Idilia. I found them deep in conversation about the event.

“This is the first external Lean Day we participate in,” Biel told me. “And it’s very interesting to see how they do it compared to how we do it at Idilia. We tend to use our Lean Day only to present the kaizens we have worked on, whereas here it seems to be much more than that. It’s an opportunity to provide feedback and vote on the A3 that people liked the most. We’ll take this idea home with us.”

Sara was just as enthusiastic. “What I found great is how much they focus on the follow-up part. On each Lean Day, they look back at the A3s that were presented at the previous one and monitor the impact the improvement has had. This is vital, because it is all too common to focus on the action and forget to follow up and check on the results,” she said.

MY THOUGHTS ON A GREAT DAY

On my flight back to Barcelona, as I reflected on this successful event (which, in my opinion, provides a blueprint for what a model Lean Day looks like), I realized that it really has multiple purposes:

• It allows knowledge to spread across the organization.
• It ensures accountability and follow-up on the improvement work.
• It represents an invaluable team-building exercise.
• It inspires external organizations to run new lean experiments of their own.

Almost a decade into their journey, it is clear that to Dreamplace, Lean provides an irreplaceable competitive advantage that has its foundations in continuous improvement and the empowerment of teams. Their motto, which Marco repeated enthusiastically before sending everyone off, is “Caminar juntos, cumpliendo sueños” - “Walking together, fulfilling dreams.” It’s not clear whose dreams it refers to. Is it the customers’? The employees’? Actually, scratch that… it doesn’t matter, because in a lean organization, everyone ends up benefitting.

_THE AUTHOR