Service Delivery System and Process Design - Tedallal's Experience - Research Paper Example

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: For an organization, competitive advantage is crucial in achieving profitability. Tedallal, a goods delivery and taxi service company, has been well-advised in recognizing this and making it a core feature in its new business objective and revamped operational strategy for its attempt to check its deteriorating profitability. This is a report on this new strategy as well as an analysis on its efficacy as implemented by the organization. Of particular significance are the offering of top-of-the line service and the provision of flexible product lines. These customer values are proven to be fundamental requirements for attracting and maintaining customers today, theoretically and in actual experience in various companies all over the world. The organization, through the new initiative, has a lot of potential and could very well be on its way to cashing in on the demand of the market and could ideally lead its industry in no time. Unfortunately, Tedallal is still experiencing difficulty primarily because its strategy is not aligned with the organizational objectives. This issue has been identified using different assessment models such as Hayes & Weelright's four-stage model, service positioning matrix (SPM), as well as concepts such as ServQual, the service profit chain, service blueprinting and the lean service concept. These frameworks revealed that there are several mismatches and incoherent elements in Tedallal’s overall business approach that compromise several features of its new operational model. This came about through several factors, including a comprehensive offering of customer values that taxed the organizational capability and resources; half-baked strategy that failed to address the achievement and maintenance of quality in products and services; and, the failure to meet market demands. These variables, collectively, put the company in a more dangerous ground, that when left unaddressed could ultimately lead the organization to its eventual demise. The key issues identified in this report that are needed to be addressed are as follows: 1. Although the organization adopts the four essential competitive priorities in its strategy as a service company, it fails to implement them each in their own respective areas as well as in a collective model that could coherently achieve the organizational objectives; 2. Tedallal lacks the organizational culture that could enable the company to attain its objective of putting emphasis on people and service. This aspect is particularly important, since Tedallal’s new strategy requires a high degree of organizational change that can only be achieved by changing people, perspectives and attitudes. 3. The strategy to utilize low-cost resources and failure to invest on its people took its toll on the organization's ability to meet the demands and expectations of the customers, respond to the changes and requirements of the complex products and values it started to offer after the strategy overhaul. As this report would establish, there is a need for restraint and sober strategy building in regards to how competitive advantage is to be approached and achieved. What this means is that decision-makers within the company should decide which aspect they want to focus on, then perfect it, excel on it, and gradually build a lasting and memorable relationship with its customers. This should lead Tedellal to modify its current strategy from the existing knee-jerk or reactive approach into a long-term, coherent and unique model tailored according to its core objectives, organizational strengths and capabilities. This report has outlined several models that could guide Tedallal in effectively aligning strategy and objectives, in every step and in every aspect – from the evaluation up to the measurement of strategy according to the corporate objectives. These information are contained in a logically structured discourse of three important aspects of the organization and its strategy: Operations strategy, activity and performance; Service delivery system and process design; and, Quality management. Each of these aspects is investigated according Tedallal's experience through three specific sections - analysis, evaluation and recommendation. It is expected that the information contained in this report could help Tedallal to finally realize its objective – profitability through competitive advantage. INTRODUCTION This paper will examine and evaluate Tedallal's approach in managing its operations. Tedallal is a service company that was established in 2007 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This company provides food and gift delivery as well as taxi services. Currently, the company is suffering from great loss in its revenues and hardly makes any profits. To address this dilemma, the top management has decided to re-examine its situation, then proceeded on drafting and implementing a new improvement plan in order to avoid or mitigate the risks that threaten the very existence of Tedalla, particularly, in consideration of the highly competitive market in Jeddah. The objective of Tedallal in its new strategy is to beat competition and to become the delivery and taxi company of choice in the city of Jeddah. Their overall strategy is characterized by the employment and utilization of the lowest cost of resources possible; providing the community with a pleasing level of services that can differentiate them from the competition; and, the attainment of a high level of profitability. 1) THE OPERATIONS STRATEGY, ACTIVITY AND PERFORMANCE: The core premise of Tedallal's strategy is to operate an organization that is customer-oriented, offering value by providing excellent customer service and very competitive product pricing schemes. In addition, the company also devised flexible transaction procedures and product offerings in an attempt to further enhance customer experience. For these purposes, low-wage labour has been employed for the positions of operations managers, operators in the call center and drivers, where - from the management’s perspective – no longer required high qualification or the high cost of training. Basically, these employees manage and operate the core business of Tedallal 24 hours per day. 1.1) Analysis The company's new operational strategy presents the four essential "key competitive priorities" that constitute the strategy of service companies (Ward & Duray, 2000) and these are: cost, quality, flexibility and delivery. These key competitive priorities are the operations performance objectives – variables that are important to measure and assess the performance of the business (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). With these objectives, it is easier to quantify profitability by setting a benchmark or standard from which the actual performance of the operations can be compared. Tedallal have succeeded in delivering the service to customers at a fairly good price that is reasonable for customers with average income, however, the cost of resources outweighs the price of the service. The profit margin can be so slim or even turn into negative to the point that it becomes impractical, leading to further losses. With regards to flexibility, another core service feature that Teddalal offers is the acceptable level of flexibility. Here, the dynamics is for customers to avail customized products and services according to their needs, as well as the level of dependability or reliability of the service in terms of speed, timing and the availability of updated information to the customer. This could have been an excellent service feature, potentially contributing to the competitive advantage of the organization. However, the service provided by Tedallal suffers from poor quality that is demonstrated in: 1) the lack of cleanness and tidiness of the cars; 2) the absence of qualified, friendly and supportive staff; and, 3) the need for innovation in the provided services. By comparing the actual performance or outcomes with the operations strategy (or operations performance objectives), one can conclude that the company has failed in terms of achieving its operations strategy, and therefore, it does not fulfill the business strategy, and that threatens the success of this business. Hayes & Weelright have proposed a four-stage model that measures the operation's contribution to business strategy. The first stage the basic performance of the organization's operations with the basic standards which only holds the organization's back, concerned about avoiding the worst problems and issues within the operation's process, and the operation's function was described as “inward-looking”. Then, when strategy is implemented in the operations, the business operations pursue the best practice, and try to compete with other similar businesses in the market. The third stage is when the company reaches a “clear view” for its business strategy, any try to develop an “appropriate” operations to be superior in achieving it to support its strategy, this is when the business starts to gain its competitive advantage. It may not be the best in the market, but definitely, they are from the best. At last, operations here consider the long-term objectives, keen to innovation and creativity and adaptable and accepting to changes in the market. In this stage the operations is making the business “one step ahead” form competitors (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). From the given information, and as shown in Appendix 1, Tedallal seems to be trapped in the first step of Hayes & Wheelwright model. Its operations is hardly providing services with minimum standards with no innovation in its marketing, nor its processes and post-services. 1.2) Evaluation The senior operations management has the full responsibility of making a diverse set of decisions which determines the organization's efforts towards gaining competitive advantage, and thus achieving the long-term vision and strategy (Prajogo & McDermott, 2008). Nevertheless, it is essential to have a "strategic fit" internally and externally (ibid). The alliance between the operation's strategy and the business strategy is vital, in other words, the different elements of cost, quality, flexibility, dependability and delivery should be aligned perfectly with goals inside the organization as well as outside the organization (the market requirements). For that reason, it is important to address the problem concerning how this company has drifted away from its operations strategy, due to the gap between the level of outputs and the standard of outputs that have been set by the company. Unfortunately, they did not meet the market requirements nor the customers’ expectations. Another aspect of the assessment was undertaken concerns the effectiveness of Tedallal's operations strategy by measuring the degree of coherency between the key competitive priorities (or the performance objectives) and the decisions concerning the operations activities (Hayes & Wheelwright, 1984; Hill, 2000). Essentially, the result implies that there is no direct relationship between the actual activities and the strategic performance level. In general, it was found that the business strategy - in terms of gaining competitive advantage does not fit the operations strategy - in terms of quality, cost, delivery and flexibility which affected the business performance (Prajogo & McDermott, 2008). And that is one reason for the great loss in its revenues as well as the loss in its ability to differentiate itself from the competition. 1.3) Recommendations: According to (Boyer & McDermott, 1999) "... the critical factor determining the success of a strategy is not necessarily which competitive priorities are stressed, i.e. cost or flexibility, but rather how these priorities are translated into a consistent set of decisions which support the particular priority that the organization stresses the most" Setting a direct and consistent relationship between the organization's activities and the operations strategy is highly recommended. and in order to fulfill that, it is advisable to recruit a committed well-trained staff, especially at the management level, to assure achieving and maintaining the quality of the business strategic performance. 2) THE SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEM/PROCESS DESIGN To explain the nature of designing the delivery system of a service provided by any organization, it must be said that designing is a “Conceptual exercise” that has to be exercised by both the management and the operational level of the company's hierarchy, and it is the first and equally important step towards an effective solution to the work-flow of the operation's process. It is the decisions and arrangements made to: Firstly, position the general layout of the process, secondly, to decide on the details that determines the feasibility of the general layout that is aimed to carry out the operations objectives (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). The process is normally designed on the basis of volume and variety of the service (ibid), as well as the nature of customer's interaction with the service provider. In Tedallal, although there is only a few range of services options, but the customer has a variety of choices within these services. For further explanation, Tedallal offers only food deliveries, gifts deliveries and taxi services, however, the customer has the full freedom to decide the number of restaurants or shops to collect his order from in the one transaction. The customer also can be picked up from any location in the city at the time he or she wishes. 2.1) Analysis In order to analyze Tedallal's system delivery, the service positioning matrix (SPM) will be applied on the actual process design of this company. SPM is a modified model from the Product-Process Matrix model proposed by Hayes and Wheelwright (1984). This model is a substantial management model in the manufacturing industry, where it defines the process design based on the product volume, the number of production and the level of customization in the products, which empirically cannot be applied in the service industry, due to the difference in the effect of the service industry variables such as volume, on its processes (Collier & Meyer, 1998). For instance, if we take Tedallal as an example, if there is great increase in the demand of its taxi services (service volume), the management will probably increase the number of cars that will deliver this service, but the actual process will remain the same. For this reason, this model cannot be transferred effectively to services, as it will not be an adequate tool for service managers to help them deciding on the most appropriate process. Due to this need, a number of researches have been undertaken to modify the Hayes & Wheelwright product-process matrix, and few models have been carried out to serve that need. One applicable matrix was proposed by Silvestro (1992) where he defined two axises; the vertical axis defined the features of the service such as: people focus, customer contact time per transaction, the degree of customization, the degree of employee discretion, value added back office/ front office and product/ process focus. The horizontal axis consisted in the number of customers served by the service transaction per day (Collier & Mayer, 1998). The matrix highlighted three types of service process in the service industry, these processes are: the professional services, the service shops and the mass services (ibid). The nature of Tedallal's deliveries and taxi services has high contact time with the customer, as the customer receives the service directly from the service provider with no intermediaries - the customer deals with the employee who is delivering his orders or driving him directly, giving this employee all the information needed and then the employee acts accordingly after coordinating with the operators in the main office of the company. Also, this service has a high level of customization, in which the main objective of the company is satisfying the consumer, therefore, the customer has a particular degree of autonomy in terms of time and other specifications for his product. Moreover, the service is more people focused, in other words, it focuses on employees rather than equipment. Ideally, the organization is supposed to employ not just the best but those individuals who fit perfectly well to the kind of organizational culture that the company envisions itself to be. In accordance to that, and according to Silvestro's service positioning matrix, Tedallal appears to be operating under the Professional service process, other service processes defined in this matrix have different characteristics; the Service shops uses intermediaries in its process and the Mass service has high focus on equipment rather that people, low customization/ high standardization in the service and customer's contact time is slightly low (ibid). Another matrix of service processes was introduced by Maister & Lovelock (1982), this SPM “helps management design a service system that best meets the technical and behavioral needs of customers”. As illustrated in Appendix 2, the vertical axis of this SPM is the number of pathways built into the service system designed by the management. The horizontal axis is the sequence of the customer's service activity (Collier & Mayer, 1998), each axis has two characteristics. The vertical axis is defined by: 1. The number of routes in the delivery system that the consumer of the service can take while consuming the service. 2.The level of control practiced by the management in the delivery system, which is mainly decides on the design of facilities, jobs and processes. Whereas the horizontal axis is defined by: 1. The degree of decision making power made by the consumer in deciding the sequence of the service. 2. The duplication of the same sequence with other customers. As a result, the matrix proposed three categories of service processes, these are: The customer routed process, the co-routed process and the provider routed process(ibid). Tedallal's management have diversified the pathway selections included in the service delivery system to satisfy customer's needs - which is a reasonable/ not high number of pathways compared to the relatively small business- this allowed the consumer to have the freedom of choice only within these pre-designed pathways, for instance, a customer can choose the type of car to be picked up with and the choice of keeping the car waiting for the customer for specific hours. Furthermore, in Tedallal, the management has a moderate degree of control. It was decided to have control over the early steps in the operation, in term of deciding on job designs, tasks and which type of cars that will present the delivery service and which to provide the taxi service. After that the process should flow smoothly, which indicates that customers have the freedom -to an extant- during the process. In addition, regarding the sequence of the process, these consumers have the freedom to customize the service by designing their own “unique” service activity sequence. For example, a considerable number of customers asks for the taxi service in a certain time everyday, such as students and employees who need daily pick ups en route to their offices or schools and back to their homes. The problem here is that the number of cars is limited and cannot satisfy the demand of all customers who are in need of it, hence, there is a only a moderate degree freedom in selecting the service sequence, as well as the moderate degree of duplicity in the same service sequence. After this analysis, it can be said that according to Maister & Lovelock's SPM, Tedallal falls under the “co-routed” delivery system/ service process characterized by mid-range services, wherein the customer and the service provider decide together the activity sequence, the selection of routes and pathways depending on the availability of the service and demand. 2.2) Evaluation To assess the validity of Tedallal's process design or delivery system, it must be compared with the main strategic performance objectives or the operations objectives- which are the same key competitive priorities discussed in the section 1, these are: quality, cost, flexibility and delivery. Since that the process design defines the detailed activities in the process that transforms inputs to outputs, then, if the outputs of this process design are not equivalent to the desirable outputs, this will only mean that the strategic objectives were not translated correctly to the process design (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). And this is exactly what is happening in Tedalla, from section 1, it was shown how the actual performance did not meet the strategic performance, thus, the level of quality, cost and dependability was slightly below the average. This is directly linked to the error in the flow of the process, which was a result of, firstly, the mismatch between the capacity of Tedallal's operation and the demand of its services in the market. Secondly, the resources were not successfully directed through the process and not fully utilized. Thirdly, the process performance objectives are not fully understood by the entire company. As a result, the output or the service provided by the company became subpar, which is very threatening in the highly competitive market. In short, from the process design analysis, it is clearly shown that the actual process design does not successfully achieve the strategic outcomes. 2.3) Recommendations It is highly recommended that the company re-assess the demand on its services and, in accordance to that, augment its capacity in order to meet the market requirement. In addition, it is essential to provide all levels of the organization- from the managerial down to the operational levels - with comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the company's strategic objectives and the characteristics of the favorable outcomes. This is crucial in creating a kind of organizational culture that is aligned with Tedallal’s business objectives. And most importantly, assigning managers to direct, monitor and continually assess the inputs in its operations though out the hole process to ensure that the outputs fulfills the operations objectives, the business strategic objectives and the market requirements. 3) QUALITY MANAGEMENT Quality is “the constant conformance to customer's expectations” (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). It is the continuous assurance of the level of fulfillment of customer needs, and an essential key that differentiate the business from competition. After assessing this business's operational performance and design in the previous sections 1 & 2, evidently, Tedallal suffers from inadequate quality in its services that consistently erodes their capability to survive. 3.1) Analysis Insuring and maintaining quality in the services delivery is very challenging, it does not only need the consideration of demand and operational capabilities (Chenet, Tynan and Money, 1999; Deshpande, Farley and Webster, 1997), it is also the understanding of the marketing concept and the role of marketers in delivering the service (Piercy & Rich, 2008). A number of concepts should be practiced by the marketing and the human resources functions of the organization, along with the operations function, these concepts are: service-quality (ServQual), the service profit chain, service blueprinting and the lean service concept (ibid). • Service-quality – stresses on the need for constant examination of quality of the service provided to customers, and involving that in the mechanism that deliver the service. This concept was proposed in the 1980's and became on of the most accurate measurements especially in the service industry, and basically, it addresses the shortfalls between the actual service delivery and the customer's expectations. “The 22-item customer survey has become one of the most widely used and replicated tools to analyze services”(Buttle, 1996). Unfortunately, in Teddallal there is an absence of a continual assessment for quality. The business is operating without the observation of the top management, besides the lack of understanding for the strategic objectives and business standards in the operational level. • Service profit chain – This concept has identified a direct and positive relationship between internal employee satisfaction (loyalty, productivity and capability) and external customer satisfaction (service quality, value delivery, profitability, business growth and customer retention), and connected those to keys in a chain (Heskett & Schlesinger, 1997). And according to Maddern (2007) “the service profit chain concept has become widely adopted within the service management community”, “the linkage between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction has been empirically verified in a number of settings” (Saura, Contri, Taulet and Velazquez, 2005). This is an arguable concept, on the one hand, it is true that in the service delivery system, the behavior of the employee determines a great deal of the service quality, on the other hand, employee's performance is not the only component that has an effect on the service, therefore, management should not only focus on individuals, but they should rather focus on the hole delivery system. • In Tedallal, the perception of staff behavior is not completely acknowledged, beside the fact that the staff have low qualifications and were not professionally trained, their behavior will depend on their mood the degree of their satisfaction with the work environment (Piercy & Rich, 2008). In this company, due to the direct contact between customers and employees, the staff manner is actually a very critical factor that affects the delivery of the service provided to customers • and directly linked to the level of customer's satisfaction with Tedallal's services. This reason explains why some customers have complained about the service. • Service blueprinting – This is a managerial exercise where every step in the operation's process is officially recorded from the beginning point to the end point as a way of making improvement decisions for the service management much easier and accurate (Shostack, 1987). “The ease with each a blueprint can be constructed and common sense can be applied to optimise the service process is highly appealing” (Coleman, 1989). Since there is an absence in the managerial role in monitoring operations in this company, this service had never been taken into consideration. • The Lean concept – The main features of a lean process are: the ability to reduce service production at any time when needed, continuous improvement, failure prevention system, Just in time production and visual control and management (Pettersen, 2009). 3.2) Evaluation By evaluating the quality of services provided by Tedallal, using the analysis tools mentioned in the section 3.1, it was clearly shown that the company failed in achieving its business strategy of providing unique services that allows them to beat the competition, due to a number of factors. First and foremost, the lack of a unified understanding of the business strategic objectives, the operation objectives and the market requirements, among all levels of the organization's hierarchy. Then, the degree of inadequacy in the direct supervision on operations from the top management. Also, by not providing sufficient training sessions to the staff, the level of quality can hardly be improved. Moreover, it is obvious that there is a lack of accurate operations and process planning, scheduling and monitoring, which make hard to react to the changes in market and demand, which means it will be hard to “lean”the process. 3.3Recommendations The quality of the business performance is the responsibility of all the people in the company, and therefore, it is advisable to ensure that everyone is aware of this principle. The Human Resources should have the responsibility of raising the knowledge-sharing culture in the workplace and increasing the level of understanding of the company's vision and strategy. The department must also lead in cultivating an organizational culture required from a service-oriented company. Initiatives such as the motivation of the staff and involving them in decision making increase employees loyalty and friendliness, which translates to excellent customer service. The Marketing can support Operations significantly, it has a vital role in improving the quality of the service provided by Tedallal. By practicing the Blueprinting concept as an important tool towards quality improvement. This technique helps the service managers visualizing the operation process steps in detail, thus, it is easier to spot errors, make the relevant measurements and propose solutions. Another effective quality improvement technique is applying Total Quality Management program (TQM). This “philosophy” shares the same concept of quality, it was defined by Khan (2003) as the concept of “fostering a culture that is continuously oriented towards increasing customer satisfaction while minimizing the real cost of production”. The Total quality management focuses on four basic ideas: 1. Complete customer focus, and this is the “core”of TQM philosophy. Then: 2. Employee involvement. 3. Continuous improvement. 4. Systematic approach to quality management. (Khan, 2003) TQM encourages the productivity of the business to be both efficient, profitable and effective, by addressing customer needs, meeting their expectations constantly and adding value to the service, the business will be differentiated in the high competitive industry and will help retaining consumers and gaining new ones. Moreover, TQM's systematic approach assures the consistency of production with the desirable measures as well as the full utilization of resources. A research was carried out in 1997 by Hendricks and Singhal confirmed that implementing an effective TQM program will “improve the profitability of the firm, increase the revenues and reduce the costs”, the research included 463 companies that had applied TQM on its operations and actually won “quality awards” (Khan, 2008). The main characteristics of TQM was listed by Martins & Toledo, (1993), which were: Quality first with total customer satisfaction, the dedication of top management, employees engagement, effective marketing is an essential key to top quality, customer orientation, error prevention and the use planning in managing processes. Although TQM programs are empirically effective tools, yet, it might fail to achieve success. Possible reasons for TQM failure are: The inadequate planning, the incomplete implementation, poor quality management, the focus on minimum standards for outcomes that might already existent, the un-continuous implementation and the non-alignment with the business strategic objectives (Martins & Toledo, 2000). Tedallal already shares many of these issues, which is seriously threatening, such failure will absolutely be very costly, which this business cannot afford. In order to succeed, Tedallal's management must guide their TQM program implementation with an adequate framework as well as a reliable management team. 4) CONCLUSION Tedallal has introduced innovations that can secure and take advantage of such potentials and translate them into immediate profits. However, reality can prove that objectives can be harder to achieve. This is particularly true when the operational strategy is not aligned to it, as demonstrated by Tedallal's experience. What the company wanted was to offer a comprehensive list of values to the market - quality service, excellent and flexible product lines, low price. By simultaneously providing these values, the organization has stretched itself too thin, compromising its ability to excel on each particular aspect, in effect delivering either unsatisfactory service or product. What is worse is that the occurrence of such circumstances are never coherent, confusing clients in regards to what is to be expected. It is difficult to reconcile the strategy to offer the best service if the company is bent on securing the most cost-effective resources such as labour. While such situation can be achieved, it would be quite challenging in Tedallal's case because of Jeddah's shortage of human resources and that it has to outsource manpower overseas. The solution here is focus. The organization should embark on an intensive market study and ask the client what it wanted best: excellent service or cheap prices? Customers would most likely choose service considering the nature of Tedallal's business. Food, goods delivered- and taxis arriving on time can outweigh a cheap service that is often late, accompanied with crude, unpolished and untrained support staff. Indeed, this aspect should have been prioritized because the new business model adopted was supposed to be people-oriented. In addition, there is also the case of satisfying the market demand. When Tedallal fails to deliver what has been promised because it cannot keep up with the demand, the offshoot is not merely a lost opportunity because such incidents tarnish the Tedallal brand. References Boyer, K. K. and McDermott, C. M. (1999), “Strategic consensus in operations strategy”, Journal of Operations Management, Vol.17 No.3, pp. 289-305. Buttle, F. (1996), “SERVQUAL: review, critique, research agenda”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.30 No.1, pp.8-32. Chenet, P., Tynan, C. and Money, A. (1999), “Service performance gap: re-evaluation and redevelopment”, Journal of Business Research, Vol.46, pp.133-46. Coleman, L. (1989), “Blueprint sets foundation for better service and customer satisfaction”, Marketing News, Vol.23 no. 26, p.14. Collier, D. A. and Mayer, S. M. (1998) A service positioning matrix. International Journal of Operations & Production Management. Vol.18 No.12, pp. 1223-1244. Hayes, R. H. and Wheelwright, S. C. (1984), Restoring our Competitive Edge: Competing through Manufacturing, Wiley, New York, NY. Hendricks, K. B. and Singhal, V. R. (1997). Does implementing an effective TQM program actually improve operating performance? Empirical evidence from firms that have won quality awards. Management Science. Vol. 43 No. 9, pp. 1258-74. Heskett, J. and Schlesinger, L. (1997), Out in front: Building High Capability Service Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Khan, J. H. (2003) Impact of total quality management on productivity. The TQM Magazine. Vol.15 No.6 pp. 374-380. Maddern, H., Maull, R., Smart, A. and Baker, p. (2007), “Customer satisfaction and service quality in UK financial services”, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol.26 No.9, pp.998-1019. Maister, D. and Lovelock, C. H. (1982), “Managing facilitator services”, Sloan Management Review,Vol.23 No.4, pp.19-31. Martins, R. A. and Toledo, J. C. (2000) Total quality management programs: a framework proposal. Work study. Vol. 49 No. 4 pp. 145-151. Pettersen, J. (2009), “defining lean production: some conceptual and practical issues”, The TQM Journal, Vol.21 No.2, pp.1754-2731. Piercy, N. and Rich, N. (2009), “High quality and low cost: the lean service centre”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.43 No.11/12, pp.1477-1497. Prajogo, D. I. And McDermott, C. M. (2008), “The relationships between operations strategies and operations activities in service context”, International Journal for Service Industry Management, Vol.19 No.4, pp. 506-520. Saura, I, Contri, G., Taulet, A. and Velazquez, B. (2005), “Relationships among customer orientation, service orientation and job satisfaction in financial services”, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol.16 No.5, pp.497-525. Shostack, G. L. (1987), “Service positioning through structural change”, Journal of Marketing, Vol.51 No.1, pp.34-43. Silvestro, R., Fitzgerald, L., Johnston, R. and Voss, C. (1992), “Towards a classification of service processes”, International Journal for Service Industry Management, Vol.3 No.3, pp. 57-80. Slack, N., Chambers, S., Johnston, R. and Betts, A. (2009). Operations and Process Management.(2nd ed) Pearson Education Limited. Harlow. Ward, P. T. and Duray, R. (2000), “Manufacturing strategy in context:environment, competitive strategy and manufacturing strategy”, Journal of Operations Management, Vol.8 No.6, pp.5-17. Appendix 1. Stage 4 Redefine industry expectations. “Externally supportive” Stage 3 Clearly the best in the industry. “Internally supportive” Supporting strategy Stage 2 As good as competitors. Externally neutral” Implementing strategy Stage1 Holding the organization's back. “Internally neutral” Hayes & Wheelwright's Four stage Model of operations contribution sees operations as moving from implementation of strategy, through to supporting strategy and finally driving strategy (Slack, Chambers, Johnston and Betts, 2009). Appendix 2. Fulfillment of customer wants & needs. Management designed service system characteristics - Customer wants high degree of freedom to select service sequence. -Unique/ Never repeated service activity sequence. Customer wants a moderate degree of freedom to select service sequence. -Low to moderate repeatable service activity sequence. Customer wants a low degree of freedom to select service sequence. -Highly repeatable service activity sequence. - Many customer pathways. - Management design a low degree of control into the service system. - Moderate number of customer pathways. - Management design a moderate degree of control into the service system. - Limited number of customer pathways. - Management design a high degree of control into the service system. The Service Delivery System Matrix (Colier & Mayer, 1998) Contents Executive Summary Introduction 1. The Operation Strategy, Activity and Performance 1.1 Analysis 1.2 Evaluation 1.3 Recommendations 2. The Service Delivery System / Process Design 2.1 Analysis 2.2 Evaluation 2.3 Recommendations 3. Quality Management 3.1 Analysis 3.2 Evaluation 3.3 Recommendations Conclusion References Appendixes Read More