Setups in Service Operations (Track: Service Operations)
Jacob V. Simons, Jr., Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30460
Abstract
Setup activities reduce the time available for production. In addition, longer setup times usually lead to larger batch sizes, thereby decreasing an operation’s flexibility. Setup reduction has been studied extensively in the manufacturing sector, but much less so in service operations. Yet service setups are both common and sizeable. While some ideas from manufacturing can be directly transferred, the unique characteristics of services create additional factors that influence service setups. This paper describes the manifestation of setups in service operations, identifies transferable ideas from manufacturing for reducing setups, and suggests additional setup activities that must be uniquely managed in services.
Introduction
Setups are not unique to manufacturing industries. Service setups are common and sizeable. In a U.S. economy that is approximately 75% service-oriented, researchers have found that employees "waste" an average of two and a half weeks a year getting ready to start and stop work. Of this time, 35.8 hours per year is spent getting ready to work in the morning, 13.9 hours getting ready for lunch, 15.5 hours getting started after lunch, and 27.7 hours getting ready to go home at night. The annual cost to employers was estimated to be $170 billion. (Biracree and Biracree, 1988)
Examples of setups may be found in a wide variety of service operations, as illustrated by Schmenner’s (1986) service process matrix. Airlines much check and load baggage, check-in customers, clean cabins, and stock aircraft galleys. Hospitals must admit patients and take vital signs. Retail stores must receive and price goods and set up displays. However, in addition to the more tangible components of the supporting facility and the facilitating goods, a service package includes both explicit and implicit (psychological) services. (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 1998) What makes services and their setups particularly problematic are these less tangible components, which are perhaps most prominent in the category of professional services. Doctors must review patient histories and test results before making diagnoses. In addition, they must maintain currency with respect to research developments in their fields. Lawyers, accountants, and architects must accomplish needs assessments and conduct research.
Service Setup Activities
To facilitate the relatively high customer contact and customization, the physical facility in a service operation must often be rearranged. For example, chairs and tables may need to be moved in a professional service (e.g. lawyer, architect) office to facilitate interaction and/or to accommodate the greater variability of arrivals that is typical of service operations. In some services, the location of the service facility itself is moved around (e.g. bloodmobiles, bookmobiles, regional health care providers). Aside from its utility, preparing the appearance of the facility is also a consideration in services. Facility decoration may be required (e.g. funeral homes) and clean-up is likely to be a greater priority in almost any service facility than in manufacturing. Finally, the physical opening and closing of the facility may be more problematic in services because the timing and method of these actions must consider not only the needs of the service providers, but also the presence of the customer.
Services often involve the use of facilitating goods. In this regard, perhaps, the setup activities most nearly resemble those of the manufacturing sector. Physical parts, materials, and tools may need to located, retrieved, positioned, adjusted, and subsequently cleaned and put away. However, the facilitating goods may also consist of information sources such as databases, rate books, historical documents, current availability information, etc. Therefore, books must be retrieved, computer terminals opened, databases accessed, etc.
For systems with higher interaction (e.g. service shops and professional services), the customer will often be present for, if not active in, the provision of the service. Therefore, service setups may include meeting and greeting customers and perhaps even holding preliminary meetings to clarify what will be accomplished when the primary service is provided at a later date or time. In addition, service providers often have the need to consult co-workers with greater experience and supervisors with approval authority. Consequently, setup may include some sort of communication or meeting with other members of the service organization. Finally, similar communication may be necessary with external agencies.
In a typical manufacturing operation, the process by which the inputs are converted to outputs is fairly well defined. However, services generally have both a greater degree and more sources of variability than does manufacturing. This variability of process may necessitate setup activities. Initially, the service provider may need to gather and evaluate data to determine the customer's needs. Based on the information gathered, the server may analyze the needs in order to classify the customer or their job. If the customer's requirements are truly unique, there may be a need for new process development, i.e. to figure out the best way to provide the service for this specific situation. Even after the service has begun, customer participation or the discovery of new information may leadto new setup activities.
Computer systems are widely used to facilitate or accomplish the planning and controls activities of manufacturing operations. While examples may also be used in services, they are certainly less prevalent. As a result, service providers, perhaps more than manufacturing workers, need time to think. On-going verbal and/or visual interaction may be needed to assess a customer's status and remaining needs. Also, since customers are often present in service operations, there tend to be more frequent interruptions to provide feedback.
Reduction of Service Setups
The variable nature of services increases the need for flexibility. From a macro point of view, this suggests consideration of making services more portable so that they can be made more accessible to customers. Although some services have always been mobile, the idea is now being more widely applied. Flexibility is also an increasing consideration at fixed facilities.
For some service organizations, the material costs involved may merit formal inventory modeling methods to ensure appropriate sizing and timing of orders. For many others, inventory control systems used for low-cost items in manufacturing are probably sufficient. In either case, it is the establishment of a systematic method which will help ensure that service is not delayed due to non-availability of parts.
Although personal computers and general purpose software have become almost ubiquitous in today's business world, I continue to observe service operations which fail to take full advantage of their capabilities. On-line systems can reduce the time and space necessary to store information, consolidate information from multiple sources, and provide rapid assistance in locating those pieces of information which are required for specific service encounters.
Bowen (1986) has expressed the idea that customers who actually participate in either the preparation for or the conduct of the service may be viewed as partial employees. If interaction with the customer is a necessary part of service delivery, the customer's participation can and should be used to the maximum advantage. To the extent possible, customers may be allowed to directly introduce whatever inputs (whether physical, psychological, or informational) are uniquely theirs, rather than requiring the service provider to solicit or guess.
Many of the service setup activities described earlier require some form of communication between people. In addition to taking steps to reduce the required amount of such communication, it would seem desirable to ease the constraints associated with its timing. Various forms of communication technology are useful in this regard. Specifically, e-mail and voice-mail make it possible for communication to be accomplished asynchronously.
Internal activities in the manufacturing context are those which must be accomplished when the machine is not running. By contrast, external activities can be done when the machine is running. One corollary of this distinction is that any activities that can be done externally should be, so that the machine's available capacity is not unnecessarily diminished. A logical extension is the subsequent desirability of converting internal setup activities to the external category, i.e. changing the activity itself so that it becomes possible to do off-line.
While service blueprinting can help ensure preparedness for more commonly encountered service experiences, there are certainly cases (especially in high customization services) where it will remain necessary for the service provider to decide what needs to be done. One model that describes this type of activity postulates that human planning is a process of preparing action resources. (Xiao et al., 1997) The implication for service setups is that advance development of these action resources should prove beneficial.
In many services, especially those in the professional quadrant and in services where the customer is not physically present, several customers or jobs may be assigned to the same server. The multiple assignments represent a backlog of work-in-process and the server is often asked to make progress and/or report the status of each customer over time. Consequently, the more tasks a server must juggle, the greater the setup time. The implication is that a reduction in the number and/or variety of tasks assigned to a single server is likely to reduce the time lost to setups.
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Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Production and Operations
Management Society, POM-99, March 20-23, 1999 Charleston, S.C.