ASSESSMENT AND DESIGN OF SERVICE SYSTEMS:CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF A SERVICE SYSTEM

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF A SERVICE SYSTEM

Quality Assessments

Usually the performance of a company is assessed by financial criteria. This may seem perfectly appropriate because the survival of a company depends on adequate profits. All other objectives (e.g., the quality of products and services) are pursued not for their own sake but rather in support of financial long-term success. Within the last decade, however, researchers and practitioners have come to the conclusion that because financial criteria relate to the past, they reflect only part of a company’s performance. The future performance and growth of a company depend equally on soft factors that are difficult to quantify, such as the quality of leadership or the qualification of the employees. The idea of integrating soft and hard factors is realized in the balanced scorecard concept (Kaplan and Norton 1996), which is gaining increasing acceptance worldwide.

Assessment is another management concept that aims at integrating all relevant factors. Especially in the field of quality management, assessments have become very popular in recent years. There are numerous examples of successful application. Here the term assessment denotes several different but similar methods that serve mainly as a tool for analyzing and documenting the actual status of an organization. An assessment can also be used as the basis for a process of continuous improvement. This leads to three main objectives of an assessment:

1. Analysis of the status quo and determination of potential improvements

2. Support and acceleration of change processes

3. Measurement of whether objectives have been achieved

An assessment can be performed in different ways, depending on the particular objectives and the effort that is spent. Table 1 gives an overview of the most relevant variants.

Most companies use an established assessment model when they carry out a quality assessment. Well-known examples are the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) in the United States and the European Quality Award in Europe. Several derivations of these models exist in different countries. All assessment models define criteria that address the various fields of improve- ment in an organization. Those criteria are grouped in categories and a procedure used both for gathering and evaluating information and for the calculation of the score is defined.

Areas for Quality Assessment in Service Organizations

While MBNQA and EQA address arbitrary organizations, this section presents ServAs (service as- sessment), an assessment model that has been specifically developed for service organizations. ServAs

contains 12 categories that describe those fields within a service organization that require attention from the management. Each category contains relevant criteria that describe the actual status of the organization with respect to the particular management field. The criteria are grouped within key areas. They have been derived from the relevant characteristics of a service system, combined with applicable elements from established assessment models (see Haischer 1996; Eversheim 1997). Figure 5 gives an overview of the categories of ServAs and the criteria.

According to the fundamental dimensions of service quality, the categories have been assigned to either the structure, the processes, or the outcome of a service. Five categories belong to the structure dimension:

1. Customer focus: How does the service organization ensure that the offered services meet the expectations and needs of customers?

2. Leadership: How is a service culture being established and maintained by senior management?

3. Employees: How are employees recruited, qualified and motivated in accordance with the company’s overall objectives?

4. Resources: Is the usage of material resources effective and efficient?

5. Quality system: Does the service organization maintain a quality system that transfers quality objectives to products and processes?

Four categories assess process quality in a service organization:

1. Service development: Are service products systematically developed within a defined devel- opment process?

2. Service delivery: How does the service organization organize the core process of service de- livery in an effective and efficient way?

3. Cooperation management: How does the organization build, use, and maintain partnerships along the value chain?

4. Customer relationship and communication: How does the service organization manage com- munication with customers and other external partners?

The three last categories address the fundamental dimensions of outcome any company strives for:

1. Employee satisfaction: How does the service organization measure and manage employee satisfaction?

2. Customer satisfaction: How does the service organization define and measure customer sat- isfaction?

3. Business results: How does the service organization establish performance measurements using financial and nonfinancial criteria?

A questionnaire has been derived from these categories and the related key areas. It is the most important tool in the assessment method. Each key area contains several criteria related to one or more items of the questionnaire. These items indicate the ‘‘maturity level’’ (see Section 5.3) of the service organization with respect to the criterion under consideration.

The questionnaire may be utilized for analyses at different depths, from an initial quick self- assessment by senior management to an in-depth discussion of the different key areas in workshops and quality circles. The results serve as a basis for planning improvement measures.

A Maturity Model for Quality Management in Service Organizations

The overall result of an assessment using ServAs is expressed in terms of the maturity level of the service organization. In recent years, models for maturity levels have been recognized as an appro- priate base for improvement processes. They are based on the assumption that the development of an organization follows some distinctive steps or maturity levels. Several different maturity level models have recently been developed for particular industries (e.g., Humphrey 1989; Rommel 1995; Malorny 1996). They have been integrated into the development of ServAs.

Using a number between 1 and 5, the maturity levels indicate how far the service organization has proceeded towards total quality management (TQM). Each level describes a typical state that an organization assumes in developing quality management. Thus, the maturity level can be easily interpreted by management and employees. It can be used internally for motivating and communi- cating further efforts in an improvement program because it provides clear objectives: ‘‘We have reached level 3—within a year we want to get to level 4!’’

Table 2 displays the five maturity levels of ServAs with their underlying principles, their most important characteristics, and the key tasks at each level.

After the questionnaire is filled in, the overall maturity level of an organization is calculated using a two-step procedure. First, the maturity level has to be calculated for each individual category. For each category and each maturity level a certain threshold has to be passed (i.e., a given number of positive answers in the questionnaire must be met or exceeded) for the maturity level to be reached. Finally, the overall maturity level is calculated from the category levels according to several scoring rules.

The Assessment and Design Procedure

Usually, the conduction of a ServAs assessment is done within the organizational frame of a project. Figure 6 shows an overview of the main phases and activities of such a project.

After the appropriate type of assessment is selected and the project team is set up and trained, the project should be initiated with a kickoff workshop that helps to communicate the project’s background and objectives to all employees. During this workshop the most important and urgent problems can be gathered in order to fine-tune the project’s objectives. In a second step the ques- tionnaire has to be adjusted to company- and industry-specific requirements, which is done by elim- inating criteria that do not apply or by adding company- and industry-specific criteria. Then information concerning the considered criteria is gathered within the organization, depending on the chosen mode of assessment. This information yields a preliminary result that has to be consolidated by eliminating contradictory statements, using different consensus-building methods. After the final score is determined, an action plan for improvement measures has to be decided on and its execution measured on a regular basis.

CONCLUSION

Managing customer service and service quality is a complex task that requires a holistic approach that takes into account people (customers and employees), material resources, and abstract entities such as products and processes. A system-oriented approach is useful for mastering this complexity because it supports the understanding of the manifold dependencies within a service organization.

The concept of a service product model that has been presented in this chapter helps to organize the variety of information that a service provider has to handle. It facilitates modularization of services and therefore the development of product bundles, variants, and entirely new products in service organizations. Defining service products enables service providers to distinguish the outcome of a service clearly from the processes and resources that lead to it, opening a variety of strategic options. However, one must keep in mind that service delivery can be never automated completely. The right balance between skilled people and intelligent products and processes is still required. The ServAs method helps to achieve this balance by supporting continuous improvement of the entire service system.