مدیریت موجودی خدمت در مدیریت خدماتManaging Service
In recent years, the practice of pushing product by building
inventory in
anticipation
of demand has fallen out of favor.
Many companies have shifted to a “pull” environment, in which they build product only in response to actual demand.
These firms have moved the “push-pull boundary” — the point at which a supply chain switches from building to forecast to reacting to demand — away from their end customers. By decreasing the amount of work completed before actual demand is known, firms avoid costly mismatches in supply and demand.
For example, Dell Inc. has assumed and maintained a leadership position in the personal computer industry in no small part by setting its push-pull boundary to offer customers greater customization. Given that repositioning the push-pull boundary has paid huge dividends for many product-based firms, it is only natural to wonder what kind of promise this approach holds for service firms. On the surface, the answer seems to be very little.
A basic tenet of service management is that services cannot be inventoried; without inventory, the location of the push-pull boundary seems to have little relevance. Yet this view relies on an extremely narrow definition of inventory as finished product waiting for customers. In practice, inventory also serves as a way to store work; because the work has been stored, customers don’t have to wait for it to be performed. In a service setting, then, the placement of the pushpull boundary defines the portion of the work that has been performed and stored before the customer arrives.We call this work “service inventory.”
Service inventory includes all process steps that are completed prior to the customer’s arrival. As with physical inventories, service inventories allow firms to buffer their resources from the variability of demand and reap benefits from economies of scale while also providing customers with faster response times. Having service inventory also facilitates using the customer as a resource and offers the potential for automating the process.
By using the correct form of service inventory, companies can offer better quality, faster response times and more competitive pricing. In this article, we will discuss how moving the push-pull boundary in service firms can be a strategic lever in designing and managing service offerings .
Services as Attributes and Processes Service inventory needs to be viewed in the context of how firms compete and create value for customers. Every service represents a bundle of attributes — quality, speed, customization and price — produced through a set of processes. Customers elect to buy from a service provider only if the attributes of its offering are more attractive than the available alternatives. How well a service firm delivers its bundle of attributes depends on its process choices. Thus, process design is one of the most fundamental managerial decisions. We emphasize three drivers of performance: the placement of the push-pull boundary, the level and composition of resources and access policies. The pushpull boundary determines how much work is done and stored as service inventory In anticipation of demand. Resources —that is, the people and the equipment that the provider employs — are used to perform the actual work of delivering a service. And access policies are used to govern how customers are able to make use of service inventory and resources (for example, when does an airline traveler complete check-in at a kiosk instead of going through an agent at the counter?). Most studies of service processes have focused on resources as the key lever in service design and performance. However, decisions about the push-pull boundary, resources and access policies are interrelated. A firm’s ability to deliver targeted levels of quality, speed, customization and cost for given resource levels depends on both how much work is done ahead of demand (and thus how much work must be done in reaction to demand) and how the firm allows customers to tap into its resources. Where to locate the push-pull boundary is thus a significant decision in service-process design.
The Role of Service Inventory There are many different types of service inventory, and the choices a service provider makes depends on its industry and desired position in the market. A rheumatologist, for example, needs to produce letters for insurers on the status of patients. A system that automatically helps generate these letters represents a type of service inventory. The tools that help customers set up and run online auctions on eBay Inc. constitute another type of service inventory. Credit rating agencies, which sell consumer data and credit scores to financial institutions, have built their entire industry around service inventory. Financial institutions,in turn, have their own form of service inventory in the predetermined rules they apply to different customers on the basis of their financial profiles and credit scores. In all these examples, the service providers have shifted the push-pull boundary by performing some part of a service before the service request has arrived. The title insurance industry illustrates some of the potential gains of moving the push-pull boundary closer to the customer. Title insurance assures a prospective property buyer (or, more specifically, A buyer’s lender) that a particular property title is unencumbered by liens or any inheritance claims. The title insurance industry has traditionally operated in a pull mode: Research about a property is initiated only when a customer requests a new policy. However, the Radian Group of Philadelphia has begun to alter this practice by gathering and storing the title information in anticipation of customer demand. Radian collects existing tax records, probate filings, deed registrations and other public records related to properties. Because it stores the records in its own database, Radian can offer title insurance on refinancings quickly and cheaply. It charges just $250 for a refinancing, several hundred dollars less than a conventional firm. Radian’s database of tax histories and deed recordings represents service inventory — indeed, it performs the same basic functions as conventional product inventory. The inventory acts as a buffer, allows the company to take advantage of economies of scale and expedites customer service. Traditional title insurance firms do little to buffer themselves from variability in the market. They must either carry excess resources to respond to demand spikes or impose long waits on customers, possibly resulting in lost sales. A traditional firm pulls tax records on only a handful of pending transactions at a time, but Radian can collect all the tax records at once — thus exploiting economies of scale for a much lower cost per unit.When a customer requests information, the turnaround time is rapid. Radian’s service inventory is like product inventory in another important respect: There are real risks that it may go to waste. Many of the houses on which Radian collects information may not be sold or refinanced for years. Even when a property is sold, the buyers may seek title insurance from a competitor. Additionally, service inventory, like product inventory,limits what the firm can deliver quickly. If Radian does not have data from certain counties, it loses it’s a dvantage over other title insurance firms working in those markets. As the title insurance example shows, service inventory is frequently made up of information such as databases or decisionsupport mechanisms. The availability of cheap computing and massive data storage often argues in favor of maintaining service inventory. In theory, Radian’s strategy of compiling information in advance of demand could be achieved without any computers, but this would require an army of clerks duplicating county records and a file cabinet for virtually every neighborhood. The costs of building and storing the inventory would outweigh its potential advantages. Although service inventory is often based on information, not all information qualifies as service inventory. It must represent pre-performed steps in the delivery process that reduce the amount of work required when an order arrives. A database of consumer credit scores is service inventory for a mortgage lender, because evaluating credit history is a large part of the lending process. A database of everyone who has applied for a mortgage in the past year, however, does nothing to reduce the work required to reply to a service request; it is not service inventory. Similarly, code that allows house hunters to search real estate listings is service inventory, but generic software such as a word processing program is not. The house-hunting code includes logic to narrow search choices and display results prioritized by the client’s criteria; it therefore replaces a real estate agent’s time and effort.Word processing software and a personal computer simply replace a typewriter; the user must still compose the letter.Service inventory based on information is in some ways distinct from product inventory. Creating a database is expensive,but thanks to the extreme economies of scale, the incremental cost of adding records to an established database is small.While the cost of producing 2,000 cars is much higher than the cost of producing 1,000 cars, the cost of building a database with 1 mil- lion records is not significantly higher than a database with 2 million records. Nor does service inventory get depleted the same way that product inventory does. A car dealer needs to have two vehicles to make two sales, but a service provider can allow hundreds or even thousands of users to tap into the same database simultaneously. Considerations in managing service inventory are thus different from those in managing product inventory. Much of supply chain management has focused on how much inventory to hold (that is, how many copies of one item); for service inventory the fundamental decisions turn on what kind of work to store. The service provider must determine for which of its offerings, it should build inventory and at what stage of completion the services should be. Our concept of service inventory is different from Theodore Levitt’s vision of industrialization of service.2 Levitt argued that a standardized service (such as Jiffy Lube International Inc.’s oil changes for vehicles) would result in significant reductions in cost. But such cost savings come at the expense of flexibility and variety (for example, Jiffy Lube does not service brakes).Moving the push-pull boundary toward the market can allow service providers to make decisions about which areas of improvement to emphasize: consistency, speed, customization or costs. Service inventory is distinct from simple automation to reduce cost. Because it is often made up of information and algorithms, service inventory benefits from information technology. But successful implementation usually depends on human intervention. For example, while computer systems make it possible for Radian to collect its property tax records, people are needed to create customer value : Underwriters need to evaluate the information , address lender concerns and finalize the policies. Even when service inventory allows for a fully automated process, people will still be necessary to handle exceptions and adjust decision rules over time. The Strategic Impact of Pushing Services Companies seeking to improve their competitive capabilities by using service inventory should pay attention to the four major service attributes: quality, speed, customization and price. Quality Consumers value various aspects of service quality, but in many cases transactional conformance — being able to get a well-defined service reliably and accurately — is the No. 1 concern. In this case, moving the push-pull boundary toward the market and increasing service inventory tends to increase service quality. An investor looking to rebalance his or her portfolio or sell stock, for example, places an extremely high value on transactional conformance. The investor wants reliable, accurate information about how best to make the adjustments, and service inventory provides an effective mechanism for satisfying this objective. Boston-based Fidelity Investments has reacted to this need by developing service inventory in the form ofWeb-based tools that allow investors to perform a variety of analyses. Transactional conformance is also critical for purchasing airline tickets, making hotel reservations and seeking technical support. It is not surprising that firms have moved such transactions to centralized call centers and Web sites. A call center agent can work through a script to answer a customer’s question or can direct the customer to a Web-based “Frequently Asked Questions” page that presents the answer online. In either case, companies rely on service inventory to optimize the quality of the transaction and the experience. Service inventory can also improve service recovery. Research has shown that customers encountering a service failure want the firm to assume responsibility for any shortcomings and guide them through a quick, hassle-free recovery process. Shifting the push-pull boundary and preparing for failures allows firms to respond smoothly and efficiently, assuming that they can anticipate the nature of the service failure. In air travel, for example, missed connections are inevitable.
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Many companies have shifted to a “pull” environment, in which they build product only in response to actual demand.
These firms have moved the “push-pull boundary” — the point at which a supply chain switches from building to forecast to reacting to demand — away from their end customers. By decreasing the amount of work completed before actual demand is known, firms avoid costly mismatches in supply and demand.
For example, Dell Inc. has assumed and maintained a leadership position in the personal computer industry in no small part by setting its push-pull boundary to offer customers greater customization. Given that repositioning the push-pull boundary has paid huge dividends for many product-based firms, it is only natural to wonder what kind of promise this approach holds for service firms. On the surface, the answer seems to be very little.
A basic tenet of service management is that services cannot be inventoried; without inventory, the location of the push-pull boundary seems to have little relevance. Yet this view relies on an extremely narrow definition of inventory as finished product waiting for customers. In practice, inventory also serves as a way to store work; because the work has been stored, customers don’t have to wait for it to be performed. In a service setting, then, the placement of the pushpull boundary defines the portion of the work that has been performed and stored before the customer arrives.We call this work “service inventory.”
Service inventory includes all process steps that are completed prior to the customer’s arrival. As with physical inventories, service inventories allow firms to buffer their resources from the variability of demand and reap benefits from economies of scale while also providing customers with faster response times. Having service inventory also facilitates using the customer as a resource and offers the potential for automating the process.
By using the correct form of service inventory, companies can offer better quality, faster response times and more competitive pricing. In this article, we will discuss how moving the push-pull boundary in service firms can be a strategic lever in designing and managing service offerings .
Services as Attributes and Processes Service inventory needs to be viewed in the context of how firms compete and create value for customers. Every service represents a bundle of attributes — quality, speed, customization and price — produced through a set of processes. Customers elect to buy from a service provider only if the attributes of its offering are more attractive than the available alternatives. How well a service firm delivers its bundle of attributes depends on its process choices. Thus, process design is one of the most fundamental managerial decisions. We emphasize three drivers of performance: the placement of the push-pull boundary, the level and composition of resources and access policies. The pushpull boundary determines how much work is done and stored as service inventory In anticipation of demand. Resources —that is, the people and the equipment that the provider employs — are used to perform the actual work of delivering a service. And access policies are used to govern how customers are able to make use of service inventory and resources (for example, when does an airline traveler complete check-in at a kiosk instead of going through an agent at the counter?). Most studies of service processes have focused on resources as the key lever in service design and performance. However, decisions about the push-pull boundary, resources and access policies are interrelated. A firm’s ability to deliver targeted levels of quality, speed, customization and cost for given resource levels depends on both how much work is done ahead of demand (and thus how much work must be done in reaction to demand) and how the firm allows customers to tap into its resources. Where to locate the push-pull boundary is thus a significant decision in service-process design.
The Role of Service Inventory There are many different types of service inventory, and the choices a service provider makes depends on its industry and desired position in the market. A rheumatologist, for example, needs to produce letters for insurers on the status of patients. A system that automatically helps generate these letters represents a type of service inventory. The tools that help customers set up and run online auctions on eBay Inc. constitute another type of service inventory. Credit rating agencies, which sell consumer data and credit scores to financial institutions, have built their entire industry around service inventory. Financial institutions,in turn, have their own form of service inventory in the predetermined rules they apply to different customers on the basis of their financial profiles and credit scores. In all these examples, the service providers have shifted the push-pull boundary by performing some part of a service before the service request has arrived. The title insurance industry illustrates some of the potential gains of moving the push-pull boundary closer to the customer. Title insurance assures a prospective property buyer (or, more specifically, A buyer’s lender) that a particular property title is unencumbered by liens or any inheritance claims. The title insurance industry has traditionally operated in a pull mode: Research about a property is initiated only when a customer requests a new policy. However, the Radian Group of Philadelphia has begun to alter this practice by gathering and storing the title information in anticipation of customer demand. Radian collects existing tax records, probate filings, deed registrations and other public records related to properties. Because it stores the records in its own database, Radian can offer title insurance on refinancings quickly and cheaply. It charges just $250 for a refinancing, several hundred dollars less than a conventional firm. Radian’s database of tax histories and deed recordings represents service inventory — indeed, it performs the same basic functions as conventional product inventory. The inventory acts as a buffer, allows the company to take advantage of economies of scale and expedites customer service. Traditional title insurance firms do little to buffer themselves from variability in the market. They must either carry excess resources to respond to demand spikes or impose long waits on customers, possibly resulting in lost sales. A traditional firm pulls tax records on only a handful of pending transactions at a time, but Radian can collect all the tax records at once — thus exploiting economies of scale for a much lower cost per unit.When a customer requests information, the turnaround time is rapid. Radian’s service inventory is like product inventory in another important respect: There are real risks that it may go to waste. Many of the houses on which Radian collects information may not be sold or refinanced for years. Even when a property is sold, the buyers may seek title insurance from a competitor. Additionally, service inventory, like product inventory,limits what the firm can deliver quickly. If Radian does not have data from certain counties, it loses it’s a dvantage over other title insurance firms working in those markets. As the title insurance example shows, service inventory is frequently made up of information such as databases or decisionsupport mechanisms. The availability of cheap computing and massive data storage often argues in favor of maintaining service inventory. In theory, Radian’s strategy of compiling information in advance of demand could be achieved without any computers, but this would require an army of clerks duplicating county records and a file cabinet for virtually every neighborhood. The costs of building and storing the inventory would outweigh its potential advantages. Although service inventory is often based on information, not all information qualifies as service inventory. It must represent pre-performed steps in the delivery process that reduce the amount of work required when an order arrives. A database of consumer credit scores is service inventory for a mortgage lender, because evaluating credit history is a large part of the lending process. A database of everyone who has applied for a mortgage in the past year, however, does nothing to reduce the work required to reply to a service request; it is not service inventory. Similarly, code that allows house hunters to search real estate listings is service inventory, but generic software such as a word processing program is not. The house-hunting code includes logic to narrow search choices and display results prioritized by the client’s criteria; it therefore replaces a real estate agent’s time and effort.Word processing software and a personal computer simply replace a typewriter; the user must still compose the letter.Service inventory based on information is in some ways distinct from product inventory. Creating a database is expensive,but thanks to the extreme economies of scale, the incremental cost of adding records to an established database is small.While the cost of producing 2,000 cars is much higher than the cost of producing 1,000 cars, the cost of building a database with 1 mil- lion records is not significantly higher than a database with 2 million records. Nor does service inventory get depleted the same way that product inventory does. A car dealer needs to have two vehicles to make two sales, but a service provider can allow hundreds or even thousands of users to tap into the same database simultaneously. Considerations in managing service inventory are thus different from those in managing product inventory. Much of supply chain management has focused on how much inventory to hold (that is, how many copies of one item); for service inventory the fundamental decisions turn on what kind of work to store. The service provider must determine for which of its offerings, it should build inventory and at what stage of completion the services should be. Our concept of service inventory is different from Theodore Levitt’s vision of industrialization of service.2 Levitt argued that a standardized service (such as Jiffy Lube International Inc.’s oil changes for vehicles) would result in significant reductions in cost. But such cost savings come at the expense of flexibility and variety (for example, Jiffy Lube does not service brakes).Moving the push-pull boundary toward the market can allow service providers to make decisions about which areas of improvement to emphasize: consistency, speed, customization or costs. Service inventory is distinct from simple automation to reduce cost. Because it is often made up of information and algorithms, service inventory benefits from information technology. But successful implementation usually depends on human intervention. For example, while computer systems make it possible for Radian to collect its property tax records, people are needed to create customer value : Underwriters need to evaluate the information , address lender concerns and finalize the policies. Even when service inventory allows for a fully automated process, people will still be necessary to handle exceptions and adjust decision rules over time. The Strategic Impact of Pushing Services Companies seeking to improve their competitive capabilities by using service inventory should pay attention to the four major service attributes: quality, speed, customization and price. Quality Consumers value various aspects of service quality, but in many cases transactional conformance — being able to get a well-defined service reliably and accurately — is the No. 1 concern. In this case, moving the push-pull boundary toward the market and increasing service inventory tends to increase service quality. An investor looking to rebalance his or her portfolio or sell stock, for example, places an extremely high value on transactional conformance. The investor wants reliable, accurate information about how best to make the adjustments, and service inventory provides an effective mechanism for satisfying this objective. Boston-based Fidelity Investments has reacted to this need by developing service inventory in the form ofWeb-based tools that allow investors to perform a variety of analyses. Transactional conformance is also critical for purchasing airline tickets, making hotel reservations and seeking technical support. It is not surprising that firms have moved such transactions to centralized call centers and Web sites. A call center agent can work through a script to answer a customer’s question or can direct the customer to a Web-based “Frequently Asked Questions” page that presents the answer online. In either case, companies rely on service inventory to optimize the quality of the transaction and the experience. Service inventory can also improve service recovery. Research has shown that customers encountering a service failure want the firm to assume responsibility for any shortcomings and guide them through a quick, hassle-free recovery process. Shifting the push-pull boundary and preparing for failures allows firms to respond smoothly and efficiently, assuming that they can anticipate the nature of the service failure. In air travel, for example, missed connections are inevitable.
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با عرض سلام ، خدمت تمام سروران که با دقت نظر و انتقادهای سازنده خود ، مرا در انجام رسالتم در ارتقاء کمی و کیفی هر چه بیشتر مطالب یاری نموده و می نمایند .