Page 15 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Services Management

Notes In service design, we seem to have followed the blueprinting movement but we appear to have
ignored the process of design in favour of this descriptive activity and the relationship between
important and often ignored, back-office activities in favour of customer-facing processes.

1.2 A Service Operations Management Agenda

This growing awareness of the need to re-operationalise service management material has led
to an attempt to develop an agenda. This section identifies some possible research issues and
questions emphasizing the core operational issues.

1.2.1 Linking operational performance to business drivers

Developing the work of Voss and Johnston, Roth and the pioneering work on the service profit
chain by Heskett, there is growing awareness of the importance of linking business drivers such
as leadership, customer orientation and more operational issues such as benchmarking, quality
control and service design, with their impact on business performance. Although the work cited
above has made significant inroads into this area, there is much more work to do. Indeed there
is significant practitioner interest in this area, witnessed by the growing interest in the use of the
Baldrige criteria and the UK/European Foundation for Quality Awards on this side of the
Atlantic. Chase points out the important roles that operations can play in this movement:
“service operations is the appropriate discipline to begin to move business from its current
emphasis on reengineering to the next step — revenue enhancement” (Chase, 1996). Two key
research questions are:
(1) What are the most efficient operational profit levers and under what circumstances?
(2) Can we map the relationships between the controllable and the outcome variables?

1.2.2 Performance Measurement and Operations Improvement

Despite some major work in the performance measurement area, many organisations seem
reluctant to critically review and develop their performance measurement systems. The balanced
scorecard, although a major step forward for many organisations, has led to a degree of
complacency once an organisation, and its SBUs, have found measures to fit all four boxes. (One
organisation was pleased to have developed new measures including “number of staff training
days” and “number of processes benchmarked” without any concern as to whether any
improvements resulted from these activities):

How can we develop frameworks to help organisations review the nature and effect of the
performance measures used?

In what situations are historical measures and targets appropriate and in what situations
are externally based targets more appropriate?
Do radical step change improvement programmes yield better or faster results than TQM
type continuous change programmes?

Does benchmarking yield the desired results or does it get caught up in interminable and
unfruitful discussions about “apples and pears” or degenerate into “industrial tourism”?

1.2.3 Guarantees, Complaints and Service Recovery — Tools for
Performance Improvement

Much organisational practice in the area of complaints and recovery has regressed into mere
marketing ploys. Complaints procedures in some organisations have become mechanisms to

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