So kudos to those of you who resourceful and brave enough to find and post a process video! Yes, that would be Quin and Malcolm!
Quin provides us with an opportunity to discuss service process design, particularly service encounter customer contact requirement, and process design in the context of the service positioning matrix (Collier & Evans, 2013, p. 140-143).
In fact, instead of me doing this analysis for you, let's do it together on Monday morning. So for Monday, watch Quin's brief video, read his post, and think about these questions referring to Collier chapters 6 & 7...
What is the service encounter customer contact requirement for library copier services?
What degree of customer discretion, freedom and decision-making power is needed?
How repeatable should the service encounter process be?
Where does this process fit on the service positioning matrix, and what are the cost and service quality perception implications?
A special shout-out to Shaina for excellent follow-up questions, and Karson for the process flowcharting expertise demonstrated in her post!
Nice work this week on your Cause & Effect (CE) diagrams (also known as "fishbone" diagrams) and Pareto charts.
The three brave souls -- Ashlyn, Karson & Shaina -- who took to MS Word to draw their diagrams did nice work not only with the drawing tools, but brainstorming potential causes and contributors related to their identified problems. These charts are very useful in starting the root cause analysis conversation; it sets the table with all the possible causes and contributors organized in such a way that you can begin to address each in turn.
The Pareto chart provides a tool that helps prioritize the causes and contributors identified in the CE diagram. Thanks to all who used the data in question 11 to create their charts. There was unanimity on which set of errors should be addressed first (shipping delays). Andrew, James & Quin argue that both shipping delays and shipping errors should be dealt with, as these two errors combined account for 80% of the problems. This is the value of the Pareto chart. It quickly stratifies a set of problems identifying which small percentage of your total list of problems are causing most of the pain. Using this tool, then, we found that 2 of problems account for 80% of the error. As a manager, we want to focus first on addressing those two issues; that's where we get the most bang for our buck.
All of our Pareto people worked to create their own charts using Excel. Congratulations! You can never have enough Excel practice. One of the features of a Pareto chart that makes life much easier is the cumulative total curve. I've attached a link above to a Pareto chart template from the American Society for Quality (ASQ), a leading quality assurance professional society. This template is easy to use and will provide both a frequency histogram and a cumulative total curve in your chart.
Just for fun, I've also attached a link to the ASQ fishbone diagram template. Another easy-to-use template for creating CE diagrams.
Thanks for your experimentation with the factor weighting method for determining a potential Save-A-Lot store location. My general feedback is contained in the attached video.
See Ashlyn, Ethan and Quin's posts for some good discussion about the factors to be considered and their weightings. Also note my points in the video regarding the connection between factors selected, their weightings, and operations strategy/CBP).
Here's one of the articles I referred to in the video. It provides some good background on Save-A-Lot's business strategy.
Here's an excellent radio story on Save-A-Lot from the customer perspective. Its worth a listen.
Today's online case presented us with a data set comprised of external and internal data, asking us to find the relationship (if any) between these data, and then develop recommendations based on the relationship found.
Many of you identified the importance of the external data in this data set: customer satisfaction. This is a crucial external measure; if we don't have satisfied customers, we don't have a business. The key in this case was to compare the customer satisfaction data with both the new applicant processing time and the plastic production turnaround time, which most of you did. Our goal is to understand the relationship between customer satisfaction and these internal metrics. Is there a relationship? In other words, does the speed at which we process new applicants and/or produce a new credit card have an impact of customer satisfaction? And if so, how much?
Using Excel to calculate the correlation coefficient between customer satisfaction and new application processing time, you found r = -0.41. The correlation between customer satisfaction and plastic production turnaround time was -0.21. Both of these suggests a negative relationship: customer satisfaction goes down as both of these times go up. But the relative strengths of these relationships is relatively weak. You visually confirmed this in your scattergrams.
Ashlyn, Andrew, James and Korey agree that better information is needed before the business can make any decisions about how to improve customer service. Better customer satisfaction surveys could be a part of this. Ethan gets us to the heart of the matter: our correlation coefficients suggest that while new application processing time and plastic production turnaround time are somewhat related to customer satisfaction, there are other drivers of customer satisfaction not captured in these metrics. To James' point, the departments need to work more effectively together to identify other potential variables (causes) and identify relevant metrics.
Another statistic that can help us understand the strength of the relationship between variables is the coefficient of determination, or r squared. The coefficient of determination tells us how much of the variance in a dependent variable is due to the variance in an independent variable, expressed as a percentage. See the excellent 3-minute video below for more background and discussion.
Take a minute to calculate the coefficients of determination for our case r-values. How much of the variance in customer satisfaction is accounted for by new applicant processing time and plastic production turn around time? What other internal company operations factors might be drivers of customer satisfaction?
Thanks for last week's online discussions of Spencer, White and Vrobelsky (2009) chapters 3 and 5. Spencer and his co-authors do a good job prompting us to think about sustainability from a biblical perspective. Our challenge is to reconcile this biblical view with the realities of 21st century business. Operations managers have perhaps the most direct impact of any managers on the sustainability of any organization. This sustainability discussion is central to our work.
Spencer Chapter 3
Spencer chapter three provides a nice overview of why Christian's should care for the environment. Each of you captured Spencer's four main points. The challenge, of course, is to consider how Spencer's perspective fits (or not) with our definition of sustainable operations from Collier and Evans (2013). Dan and Quin touch on what is perhaps the central question for Christian business people and managers: is there a difference between the "spiritual" and the "secular"? Can Spencer's spiritual perspective be reconciled with Collier's 21st century business perspective, or are they simply speaking to different audiences and issues? Can we apply our ancient faith the how we design and operate our businesses? (I'm exaggerating Dan & Quin's points here for the sake of argument.) Ashlyn, James and Kory think we can. See their posts for some particularly insightful analysis and integration of Spencer and Collier. But is it really that easy? This is where Spencer chapter 5 can be useful in at least helping us to make the transition from theological theory to contemporary reality.
Spencer Chapter 5
Chapter five identifies and develops six practices of sustainable living as found in the Bible. Much of Spencer's discussion is drawn from the Old Testament, beginning with the jubilee regulations. All of your 9/12 posts hint at or specifically identify what Spencer identifies in chapter six as the "controlling idea" for this whole sustainability discussion: the quality of relationships with God and between human beings" (Spencer, et al., 2009, p. 148). Many of you identified concern for the vulnerable as one of the biblical practices identified by Spencer as one of the most important to you. Your discussion of the "roots" and "jubilee" practices was often linked to your observations and thoughts regarding the vulnerable. See James' post for a particularly thoughtful and heart-felt discussion of why jubilee and the vulnerable are so important to him.
So now what?
While the biblical practices Spencer identifies clearly have social elements, his book is written with a slant towards encouraging individual action. Our challenge as business people is to translate and apply this discussion to our role as operations managers. How do we realize these principles and practices in the operation of our business? Caring for the vulnerable is a good example. Several of you identify corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts as one way to realize this principle in business operations. But are there other ways to address this principle? Check out the Broetje Orchards story for an example of how the Broetje's built concern for the vulnerable into their business strategy. (Click on the image below to go to the First Fruits website.)
http://www.firstfruits.com/founding-dream.html
Thanks for the thoughtful sustainability conversation last week. As you will discover, the Interface story provides us with yet another example of a successful company (this time in the carpet business) integrates sustainability into their business strategy and operations.
Thanks for taking on the challenge of translating the data from Collier & Evans (2013) chapter 18, problem 6 (p. 409) into a Gantt chart. As we discussed in class earlier in the week, one of the critical aspects of Gantt (and CPM charts) is to clearly identify predecessor activities or tasks. When a specific activity has a predecessor activity, that means the new activity cannot begin until the predecessor has been completed. Once predecessors are identified and entered into the Gantt chart tool, the chart produced will provide a helpful visual representation of parallel project activities, and give you a view as to how delays or accelerations in activity progress will affect the project schedule.
One of the most confusing activity-predecessor relationships is activity J: prepare report. Before the report can be prepared, activities E, G and I must be completed. If you think about the content of activities E,G & I, this makes sense. We can't write the report until we've studied the existing technologies (E), conducted an equipment analysis (G), and determined the organizational impacts (I). Of these three activities, activity G is the one that ends at the latest date (based on its start date and estimated time of 10 days). So, we cannot begin to prepare our report (J) until activity G is completed, even though activities E and I will be complete well before G.
Check out Ethan's post for a good example of how a Gantt chart for this project should look.
Regarding the OM case study
Only Karson and Ethan had questions about the case study assignment. You may have the similar questions... check out Karson and Ethan's questions, and my responses to them, in the discussion board.
Note that our first in-class case study workshop is twelve days from today on September 17. You'll be bringing your first draft of part 1 to class that day for discussion and feedback. If you have any remaining questions about the assignment or your target company, bring those with you on Monday September 7 so you can get started on case study part 1 sooner rather than later.
