Customer Story: MGM Grand - Happy Employees Make Happy Guests

Las Vegas, the world's playground. What makes the center of the gaming and hospitality industry go? People.

And MGM resorts is the largest single employer on the strip. With more employees than the population of many cities. MGM Resorts has 10 properties on the strip. We have Aria, we have MGM Grand, Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Mirage.

Each property is like its own little city. We have gaming, we have hospitality, we have food and beverage, we have retail, we have a lot under one single roof. In the U.S. we service 62,000 employees in all. A unique factor is they work all day long and it's quite an amazing feat to operate some of these buildings.

Kronos was on hand to see Aria's food and beverage department prepare for a 2,500 person conference. I don't think anyone gives a lot of thought to the fact the every plate, fork, knife, spoon, glass has been cleaned, polished, racked, stacked, redistributed from where it is cleaned and polished and may have to go a mile just to get to where it has to lay out. Managing a workforce that serves thousands of visitors daily requires coordination on a massive scale. We juice our own juice here on the property for everywhere, including every single bar on the property. That can be anywhere from 600-700 gallons a day. That's about 35,000 oranges.

When you think about it that way you wonder how it happens? It happens with a varied and diverse workforce that has multiple payroll requirements and union regulations. We have about 55 bargaining agreements in place, following the union rules and understanding the vacation and leave aspects. We have about 38,000 pay rules to support those union bargaining agreements. An employee may be able to work many different jobs. For example a bus person may be able to work as a hostess as well or a food server in a different outlet.

Food and beverage only could be anywhere from 20-30 different classifications of people, different pay scales, different rates, tips, non tips. It's very complex. We need solutions that can help us manage across that. So we partnered with Kronos to make sure that we were going to end up with the system that we needed to support all of that.

Getting visibility into the workforce is probably the most powerful thing that we can get. The 24/7 access that the managers have to employee data gives them the greatest opportunity to make sure that they have the right people doing the right job at the right time. We have tip compliance, annual allocated tip reporting, which is unique to our industry.

Those tips that you hand over to the dealer are pooled. They use the Kronos product to allocate those tips based on hours worked, but they also have a special allocation for any vacation days, sick days, so they pay taxes on those tip amounts received and those are reported to the IRS. It's very complicated and the Kronos system handles all of that for us. Not only are tip allocation and union pay rules handled by the Kronos system, so is regulatory compliance. MGM Resorts International is licensed by the gaming control board to do business. We have gaming card licenses for our gaming folks, such as the table games, dealers, and the slot folks.

Kronos technology absolutely handles that, making it visible to us that these licenses are ready to expire, otherwise this could cost the company quite a bit of money. Without the compliance we wouldn't be in business. Kronos has been a great partner with us and has delivered a product that really works for our employees. We don't want them frustrated that a system didn't work or they couldn't log in or anything else.

They can come to work and do as they need to do. Kronos provides us with the capability to manage our workforce more effectively and if we need to make enhancements their team is right on it. As we look to the future, thinking about deploying in the cloud, thinking about the way modern people interface with systems...Kronos of course lives in a forward thinking world of technology and so they brought insights to us that said we can help you beyond what your business is currently today. We don't skimp on the type of salt we buy and we don't skimp on the software we use. We try to provide the best for our employees in the hopes that we are providing the best that we can possibly provide for our guests.

That's results to the bottom line. It's hard to quantify, but we know the value of service in this business. We know at MGM the value of servicing our employees so that they're then servicing our guests well.