W5_LUCKY_Benchmarking Service Excellence

W5_LUCKY_Benchmarking Service Excellence

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Problem Definition

·         Benchmarking service excellence – synchronizing resource capacity with service demand: the Nigerian maintenance service company experience

Problem/ Need Formulation and Evaluation

Striving for higher customer satisfaction, loyalty and reduced service costs, service organizations are in dare need of adopting strategic actions to align service demand with resource capacity – technicians, parts, and fleets.

Feasible solutions

The company has been discovered to be a laggard following the findings of the conducted survey. As a laggard, for success to be achieved, the Nigerian maintenance service company must adopt the following:

·         Centralize scheduling of service resources

o   Use technology to fully integrate – identify, develop cost/benefit of alternatives, select best alternative, roll out

·         Perform quarterly or more frequent measure of service employee engagement

o   Outsource to third party service provider

·         Use service performance to evaluate and modify scheduling criteria

o   Consistent performance review

Enablers for the success of the above recommendations include:

·         Scheduling – use of technology is highly recommended

·         Dispatch of Technicians – use of  technology is highly recommended

·         Forecasting – use of technology is highly recommended

Performance monitoring and post-evaluation of results

To fully implement the solutions presented above, the following aspects of the organization will be monitored for desired results:

 Organization

Restructuring the organization to have a senior executive accountable for the entire service operation will enable the organization to perform optimally. Currently the Nigerian maintenance service company has a field service manager partially playing the role with the contract operations manager, sales manager and the procurement manager doing scheduling activities at one time or another. Best-in-class organizations have a forecasting and planning specialist fill this role.

Technology

The Nigerian maintenance service company still uses spreadsheet to do forecasting and capacity planning, at the local level. The use of technology can offer substantial benefits in the areas of scheduling work activities, forecasting workload and dispatching service technicians.[1] (Jain, 2007). The improvements realized by companies adopting technology –enabled optimization are depicted in figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1: Improvements as a result of Technology Deployment to Align Demand with Capacity (People, Parts, Fleet)1 (Jain, 2007)

Examining the financial impact of the improvement in productivity metrics as shown in figure 1 above clearly brings to the fore the Return on Investment (ROI) that accompanies technology-enabled initiatives.

Conclusion

However, the research work revealed that a lack of an integrated solution that can handle demand forecasting, capacity planning and service execution constitutes an impediment to service optimization.

 

References:

1.       Sullivan, W., Wicks, E., Koelling, P., Kumar, p., & Kumar, N. (2012). Engineering economy (15^th edition). England: Pearson Education Limited.

2.       Jain, A. (2007). Underpinnings of Service Excellence: Synchronizing Resource Capacity with Service Demand. Retrieved from http://www.astea.com/en/forms/webinar.aspx?t=whitepaper17

3.      Purdue OWL APA style, (2011). APA formatting and style guide. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/19/

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[1] Jain, A. (2007). Underpinnings of Service Excellence: Synchronizing Resource Capacity with Service Demand. Retrieved from http://www.astea.com/en/forms/webinar.aspx?t=whitepaper17 (P.13)