Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to measure the service quality provided by a public health-care service provider using the lean manufacturing concept. The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as a measure for efficiency. The relative efficiency measure concept is introduced.
Design/methodology/approach
– The inpatient and outpatient pharmacies providing medicines to the public at a large regional hospital in the southern part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were the focus of this study. The lean manufacturing concept is used as a method to improve the service quality and reduce the time needed to deliver the medicine by comparing the efficiency between these two pharmacies based on a metric used in lean manufacturing called takt time. A team was formed to study the current situation, and recommendations based on lean manufacturing were suggested for implementations.
Findings
– The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as an efficiency measure to compare between different departments working under the same managerial system.
Originality/value
– The results presented in this paper are reliable, objective and may be generalized for measuring the relative performance efficiency between several departments providing the same type of services.
In this paper, the pure rolling contact stresses in conical rollers under normal loading are studied. The existing analytical expression for pure rolling contact pressure in uniform cross-section cylinders is modified to determine the contact area, the contact pressure, and its distribution in conical rollers under normal loading. The Hertzian contact stresses are determined for the modified pure rolling contact pressure distribution. The theoretical results are compared with the finite element analysis using ABAQUS, for different vertex angles, materials, and loads. The results of the theoretical model are found to be consistent with the finite element simulations in predicting the contact pressure, the distribution, and the contact stresses in conical rollers.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the service quality of wireless telecommunication services in the UAE.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses the five dimensions of SERVQUAL instrumentation (reliability, assurance, tangibility, empathy and responsiveness) that are believed to represent service quality to approach a result of service quality level through comparing customers’ expectations to their perceptions. A SERVQUAL survey was constructed and distributed among a total number of 100 Etisalat users from four different age groups.
Findings
The results showed a significant difference between users’ expectations and the current level of quality of services in tangibility dimension of quality. The other variables were ranked in this order, assurance, reliability, responsiveness and empathy in service quality.
Research limitations/implications
The research findings encompass individuals from society only and may not be practical to generalize the findings to business organizations or industries as they have special offers and packages designed for their nature of the study.
Practical implications
This research is intensely valuable for Etisalat telecommunication company as it reflects and rates their service provided to the individuals of the society (citizens and residents) from five different critical dimensions. Consequently, it offers the firm the chance to improve the negative gaps in their services. Thus, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Originality/value
This study demonstrated that a multi-cultural society could influence customers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality. The study results showed opposing expectations and perceptions to the same dimension from people of the same age group. The highest gaps were found to be in the tangibility and assurance dimensions whilst the lowest gap was found in the empathy dimension.
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Radiology divisions at hospitals face great difficulties to meet the core of the administrative expectations, including serving patients in timely fashion. This gives rise to the need for full review and evaluation of the system in place. One of the top evaluation criteria of any medical institution is the quality of service provided at the same time satisfying the patient needs. This study includes applying discrete event simulation as a management tool. Data related to the processing time were collected. Other data related to the arrival time were retrieved from records over a period of one year. A model was developed and the outcomes provided the hospital management team with a tool to make an efficient administrative decision resulting in improving the quality of the scanning services. Improvement on the operating system was achieved by reducing the patient waiting period and enhancing the quality of the provided service. The main contribution of this study is gearing towards evaluating the efficiency of applying Arena simulation software to a radiology department within a healthcare system. This process is carried out in conjunction with trade-off analysis in decision-making process of the operations of MRI radiology departments. This study is based on optimizing techniques to facilitate the decision-making process at a higher management level.
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