Niall Piercy

Lean transformation in the pure service environment: the case of the call service centre

Purpose – Service businesses are struggling with customer demands for better quality service and managerial demands for cost reduction. There is evidence to suggest that service businesses are in practice failing on both these counts, seeing increased costs and reductions in service quality. The application of lean production approaches to the service context has been suggested as a means to resolve these problems, reducing costs and improving quality. Despite the validation of lean approaches in the product‐service context, the application of lean approaches in the pure service environment remains largely untested. The purpose of this paper is to assess the suitability of lean production methodologies in the pure service context.Design/methodology/approach – Three financial service companies in the UK were followed through a common programme of lean transformation. The improvements observed in each company were recorded. The change programme is evaluated to determine the “leanness” of the initiatives. Th...

The relationship between lean operations and sustainable operations

Purpose – The adoption of lean operational practices and independently the uptake of business practices related to sustainability and corporate social responsibility continues to grow. Past research has hinted at relationships between these two areas – suggesting that “lean is green” (e.g. Florida, 1996). The lean mantra of waste reduction and “doing more with less” is immediately apparent as delivering environmental benefits and has formed the basis of past research (e.g. Hughes, 2012). Almost all research linking lean operations or lean supply chains to sustainability issues have focused exclusively on environmental impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the broader sustainability benefits of lean operations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a longitudinal multi-year (up to four years observation), multi-case analysis (n=5). Findings – The paper reports that lean operations meet a wide range of sustainability outcomes beyond environmental benefits (including supply monitoring, trans...

High quality and low cost: the lean service centre

Purpose – There are two objectives of this paper: first, to examine the application of lean production improvement techniques to the pure‐service context; and, second, to evaluate the contribution of lean production techniques to services marketing improvement.Design/methodology/approach – Three case companies from the UK financial services sector are tracked through the process of lean improvement. Analysis of management change of a common process within each company forms the basis of the investigation.Findings – Research findings highlight that, through the adoption of lean service tools, service call centres can serve the traditionally competing priorities both of operational cost reduction and of increased customer service quality. The lean approach is validated in the service context and proposed as a valuable addition to traditional service marketing approaches to services improvement.Practical implications – The techniques described are easily replicable by academics, practitioners and managers an...

Placing a Hand in the Fire: Assessing the Impact of a YouTube Experiential Learning Project on Viral Marketing Knowledge Acquisition

The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an experiential learning social media project that was integrated into a graduate marketing class. As part of the semester-long project, students were required to work within a team and create a spoof video, which was posted on YouTube. Students’ success was partially determined by the number of views made of the particular video. After reviewing the results obtained by a semistructured survey, the research indicates that the inclusion of an experiential project into the core curriculum was associated with student motivation, engagement, team management, and communication skills. Furthermore, this integration promoted learning of technical and theoretical knowledge related to consumer-generated advertisements and virtual viral marketing. Results and implications are discussed.

Framing the problematic relationship between the marketing and operations functions

Marketing and operations as functional areas constitute the key value adding areas of the business organisation. It is these areas that are responsible for specifying what is produced, how it is produced and actually delivering goods and services to customers. Close collaboration between marketing and operations is vital to ensure effective fulfilment of organisational aims. In practice, the relationship between these two areas has been marked by fighting and hostility rather than co‐operation or partnership. In this paper, the literature that has examined this relationship is analysed. From this, six key issues are proposed that have resulted in the poor working relations seen in practice. These are: conflicting reward systems, different backgrounds and philosophies, functional separation, politics and resource allocation, management failure and academic failure. Implications for marketing practice and future research directions are then identified.

Strategic marketing and operations relationships: the case of the lean enterprise

Commentators are increasingly suggesting that marketing may be suffering a ‘mid‐life crisis’ and that marketing research and practice is stagnating and loosing corporate influence. In parallel, the management of operations is gaining increasing organisational attention and research prestige. One of the most influential of the new operational strategies is the lean enterprise, which proposes organisational design based around its own core principles, extending from raw materials to final consumer. In this paper, we investigate the short‐comings of the value definitions contained within the lean enterprise, and propose that an opportunity exists for the strategic integration of marketing activities and lean operations to provide marketers with access to a tool kit for quality and efficiency improvements, whilst at the same time resolving shortcomings in the lean enterprise to improve organisational effectiveness in the marketplace.

Positive and negative cross‐channel shopping behaviour

Purpose – Purchasing behaviour across traditional retail and internet routes to market is becoming increasingly integrated. The positive and negative consequences of such behaviour for multi‐channel businesses have not been thoroughly examined – while an offline retail presence may reassure customers purchasing from an online channel, poor service online may negatively influence customer usage of an offline channel. This paper aims to address this issue.Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire survey of the online customers of four companies is employed and structural equation modelling used to investigate influences of demographic and behavioural variables (purchase involvement, loyalty, experience with the internet, company and product‐type) on positive and negative cross‐channel behaviour (CCB).Findings – Strong evidence for both positive and negative customer CCB is found. Females, higher purchase involvement, higher loyalty and those with more experience of the company were more likely to displa...

RFID integrated systems in libraries: extending TAM model for empirically examining the use

Purpose – The available literature suggest that the research on radio frequency identification (RFID)-related issues is largely concentrated on technical, organizational and implementation aspects, and comparatively lesser attention has been invested in understanding the use aspect of such library management systems. The purpose of this paper is to gain an understanding into the factors that influence the use of RFID systems in the library context by empirically testing the relevant constructs from the extended technology acceptance model (TAM). Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire-based survey approach was employed for collecting the relevant data from 197 respondents. The respondents were the active users of a RFID-based library system. Findings – Findings from this study suggested that perceived usefulness and system quality positively influence the user attitude, and user attitude and system quality significantly influence the use of the RFID services. The paper concludes with outlining the s...

Losing patients: a systems view on healthcare improvement

The complexity of organisations in the public sector, in comparison to those in the private sector, can make it difficult to transfer operations management practices and approaches. The adoption of systems-based improvement methodologies have been widely reported for industrial organisations and are increasingly popular in the public sector, notably in healthcare, as a means to improve productivity, cost and quality positions. Adaptation is however a major challenge facing contemporary healthcare management and while research on improvement in healthcare is extensive, most studies focus on distinct features of the system (such as waiting lists or operating room utilisation) rather than the system as a whole. This article presents a systems analysis of hospital healthcare in order to capture the dysfunctions in the existing system and more importantly understand their inter-relationships. Such a conceptualisation in this context remains absent from the literature but will be necessary for any healthcare organisation seeking systems level improvement. This article explicitly codifies the dysfunctions of the current system in a new framework, developed over 4 years of in-depth investigation that rectifies this shortcoming allowing practitioners, managers and policy makers to begin real systems improvement.

Improving marketing–operations cross-functional relationships

Collaboration between marketing and operational areas is critical to business success. Despite this, in practice most companies suffer hostile and adversarial relationships between these functions. Existing research has not sufficiently addressed methods for improving this situation outside of the large corporation or manufacturing sector. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming, investigating mechanisms to support better cross-functional relationships in the small–medium enterprise and in the service sector. Five case studies are presented of companies that displayed a-typically good relationships between marketing and operations groups. A cross-comparison is conducted to identify key themes and approaches that provide for and support good cross-functional relationships. Three key methods are presented and proposed as sources of positive marketing–operations relationships: (1) manipulation of pay/reward mechanisms; (2) clear strategy and strategic leadership; and (3) an explicit focus on bringing people together.