Flexible Deployment: Making Decisions that Optimize Service and Costs

Chapman, Paul T.

doi:10.1108/eb039509

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Companies which want to perform in this environment must design and manage SDPs that are able to match customers' activity patterns. This is sometimes referred to as "flexible deployment" [32]. The time horizon over which changes in time and place are required ranges from instantaneous (for services such as cellular phones) to seasonal (such as all services that follow vacationers to their destination) to long-term, as customers shift their living patterns (such as working out of suburban home or working weekends).…”

Section: Change Of Time and Placementioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility and technology in services: a conceptual model

Harvey

Lefebvre

1997

International Journal of Operations &Amp; Production Management

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IntroductionBanking is a service industry under pressure. Customers want to make banking transactions from the comfort of their homes or from the airport, since that is where they may have an hour or two to kill. If they need a new house, they do not want to go through a completely separate process to get a mortgage, and they do not want to wait two weeks for an answer [1]. Customers do not accept anymore that they obediently have to put up with any service delivery process (SDP) that the bank has designed -more often than not with economy rather than quality of service in mind -such as lining up for 30 or more minutes or having to deal with three different employees to complete a mortgage transaction. Increasingly they want one-stop service, forcing banks to stop and reverse their earlier efforts at division of work and specialization. Increased competition has triggered a proliferation of new products targeted at increasingly fine market segments: special parent-controlled accounts for children, special deposit accounts for teenagers, variable interest mortgages for young couples, etc.Thus banks, like most service companies, have to deal with the increasing variety of demands made on their service delivery processes by an increasingly fractioned and demanding market. Flexibility is one of the management theorist and consultant's most frequent prescriptions to help companies deal with this. The prescription generally involves, among other things, a strong dosage of technology[2], and service personnel who are willing and able to help customers in many different ways. Dealing with increasing variability, however, entails substantial penalties in time, cost and quality. Thus the quandary: how much variability should service companies accept and how should they cope with it? This is a question to which manufacturers for decades have tried to find answers. The very notion of flexibility in manufacturing is only now being circumscribed [3][4][5][6]. As the notion becomes clearer, commonly held assumptions concerning computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) as a source of flexibility are being convincingly challenged [7]. The debate on the flexibility of service processes suffers from the same confusion that plagued manufacturing for years. Does flexibility mean the same thing in services as it does in manufacturing? Is it as important? Does it involve the same challenges? Are

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Section: Change Of Time and Placementioning

confidence: 99%