Service Operations

The mark of an outstanding service organization is the continued effort it devotes to widening the gap between itself and its major competitors on both service quality and productivity. The effort is both diligent and persistent, almost crusade-like in nature. It's like a singles-minded fixation on the challenge. It involves large number of people, from front-line personnel to CEO and middle managers. The irony is that service companies that have already established superiority in quality and productivity over all or most of their competitors, they still don't think they are good enough. Whether they are right or not, it's a healthy attitude.
The main challenge that managers of service operation cite is the difficulty, compared with manufacturing industries, of controlling quality. Often they go further to attribute their difficulties to the fact that many services are delivered as they are produced, often by the same person; another difficulty comes from the great sensitivity of service quality to day to day variability in attitudes and behavior of personnel, the impossibility of inspecting a service before delivering it, the challenge of supervising a large army of front line employees, often found in hundreds of service facilities located close to customers, and the challenge of measuring service quality.

Lean service management is the managerial approach which A-CCI brings to its clients in order to take their operations in a journey towards continuous improvement in quality and productivity. Breakthrough improvements in quality and productivity are achieved through a widespread consciousness on which are the current level of service quality performance and waste performance. Such consciousness is supported by a quality and waste measurement system and by continuous and deep attention to every "problem", in terms of missing application of service standards and ways in which service is delivered, in concrete facts, not only reading customer satisfaction reports or complaint reports.