Ehrlich Executive Summary
Ehrlich is a Pest Control company since 1928 which provides pest control services to homeowners and business. With offering low prices and excellent services as compared to large competitors (eg Ecolab), Ehrlich has turnover and consistently get profitability every year.
The Core Function Activities of Ehrlich :-
|Core Function Activities | |
|Marketing & Sales |Promote services to customers |
|Service Department |Design new services to meet customers’ needs |
|Operations …show more content…
|Provide technical services to customers for good quality |
Operations as described in a form of “Input – Transformation – Output” processes in Ehrlich:-
|Input (Resources) |Transformation Process |Output |
|- Services Technicians |-Pest Control Services |-Pest Control for residential and |
|- Pest Control devices and |-Consultancy Services |commercial customers |
|materials |-Product Sales Services | |
Ehrlich is offering 3 different products only, such as “Pest Control for Residential Customers” , “Pest Control for Commercial Customers” and “Product Sales for Commercial Customers”.
Pest Control for Residential Customers
This is quick response and free consultation over a hot line or a quick on-site inspection, do pest control within an hour service. This service is only fit for residential customers and technical skills to service technicians for this service are relatively low as compared to “pest control for commercial customers”. In general, the contacts between technicians and customers were not much as one kind of pest killing spray can kill several common kinds of pests/insects in household. The technician normally gets brief information from hot line, inspects areas and do spray onto areas once they
arrive.
Pest Control for Commercial Customers
The Technician stays in customers’ sites. This service is common to customers as technician is needed to inspect and review the site before providing pest suggestion to the customers. Contact and communication between the technician and customers are relatively high. In general, highly skilled trained technicians will be assigned as requirements for technical skills of technicians are very high and different customers may expect different technical difficulties.
However, District Managers may feel headaches sometimes when shortage of high-skilled technicians making difficult in arrangements.
Product Sales for Commercial Customers
Product Sales are mainly for those customers with in-house pest control staffs. Ehrlich sells pest control materials for “do-it-yourself” through local district offices. When faced with pest problem, people will resolve it on their own and this service provides advice and materials for the job. Therefore, contact/communication will be the least among other two product services. Commercial organizations with trained applicators/pest control operators can purchase bulk materials through Ehrlich Distribution. Ehrlich, with fast delivery times promising shipments leave warehouses within 24 hours of order receipt. This makes a vast array of in-stock materials.
Analysis of service products by examining Volume, Variety, Variation in Demand and Visibility/Degree of Customer Contact are as following table. 1 mark -the lowest ; 5 marks- the highest.
|Service Products |Volume |Variety |Variation |Visibility/Degree of Customer |
| | | | |Contact |
|Pest Control for Residential |5 |1 |2 |1 |
|Customer | | | | |
|Pest Control for Commercial |1 |5 |5 |5 |
|Customer | | | | |
|Product Sales for Commercial |3 |3 |3 |1 |
|Customer | | | | |
It is obviously a big different between “Pest Control for Residential Customer” and “Pest Control for Commercial Customer”. The “Pest Control for Residential Customer” is nearly standardized and high repeatability step for which pest control materials used are almost the same, therefore; the variety is low and volume needs is high. Moreover, the customer contact is low as the technician only reviews the problem on-site after the consultation through hot line, and do spray pest materials onto the suspected areas. However, “Pest Control for Commercial Customer”, technician is needed to stay in customers’ sites increasing contact with customer and facing different problems everyday in different kinds of organizations (e.g. hotel, food plant, retailer and etc). Thus, less systemization, low standardization and high variation can be easily seen.
“Product Sales for Commercial Customer” is directly provided product services for those commercial customers with in-house pest control inspector. What pest control materials want is depended on in-house inspectors after inspecting their sites. Therefore, medium volume and variety are seen due to different commercials with different material needs for pest problems. A “degree of customer contact” is relatively low as commercial customers have experienced in-house pest control inspectors. Direction of use and functions of pest control materials may be enough to provide through customer’s hot line.
We would define these 3 service products into the below process types:-
|Service Products |Process Types |Volume |Variety |
|Pest Control for Residential |Mass Service |High |Low |
|Customer | | | |
|Pest Control for Commercial |Professional Service |Low |High |
|Customer | | | |
|Product Sales for Commercial |Service Shop |Medium |Medium |
|Customer | | | |
Customers contact to each product services are in different degrees. On-site technicians have highest customer contact among other 2 product services since the technician stays in customers’ sites all the day. They perform non-standard practice and it is crucial that a more experienced technician is being assigned to the job.
For the other 2 product services, customers can contact Ehrlich’s 45 district offices’ phone no. or a toll free hot line:
[pic]
Customers can dial a toll free hot line or local district offices’ phone numbers. Based on record, about 88% of customers made right calls to district offices dealing with pest control issues, such as report of pests in house, commercial consultation, change appointment date or complaints about inefficiency of pest control materials being used. About 5% calls were made incorrectly to the District offices. The remaining 7% was unknown.
Customer query process :-
No
Yes Yes
Yes Finish
No/ Safer to visit
Yes Finish
No
In order to provide high quality service, crucial points in each stage are stated in the bellow :-
|Process Stages |Crucial issue(s) to each stage |
|Receptionist understands query? |Make sure receptionist is patient, helpful and fully understand |
| |the customers’ needs. She may have some technical knowledge, thus|
| |know capabilities of the technicians. |
|Manager understands query? |Make sure manager is patient enough to understand customers |
| |especially when the customers start getting trouble on pest |
| |control materials/services provided previously. |
|Put through to appropriated technician |Make sure to connect to right person. Customers would upset when |
| |their calls are transferred around the office but still nobody |
| |can help. Thus, “choose right person at the first time” is |
| |important in this stage. |
|Check customers status |Ensure customer status is still active. |
|Arrange technician to site visit |Ensure to send a suitable technician. For instants, it is not a |
| |good choice if technician is familiar with residential but send |
| |him to large industrial plant. |
|Technician arrived at customer’s site |The technician should arrive within scheduled time. He should |
| |also well equipped with “right” materials and instruments. |
|Problem solving |Solve the problems as efficiency as possible. |
|Send another technician if problem cannot be solved |Ensure the second technician understood the problem before go. If|
| |possible, the second technician has to finish the job. |
In general, customers would like products at the lowest price with highest quality, greatest customization, fastest response and highly reliable on the services. Therefore, the performance of each service products could be based on the performance objectives, namely “Quality, Speed, Dependability, Flexibility and Cost”.
Quality is characteristics and features of product/service which can satisfy customers’ needs. It means “do things right” although it means different things in different operations. Good quality will always reduce potential risks from errors and cost, especially rework and scrap cost. It can also retain customers, less complains, work more efficiency, thus cost saving is achieved. Importantly, by knowing customers’ needs and standard set to you, company can provide good quality to customers.
Fast response service can avoid any unnecessary delay to customers. Either residential or commercial customers would like to solve pest problems as soon as possible for resuming their normal life or operations. Fast delivery is also important for customer is running out of stock. Time is money, especially in commercial sectors who do not want to delay their productions/operations.
Dependability ensures customers highly rely on the service. Maintaining promises would be a good example of it.
Flexibility allows variation of service products available. Ehrlich offers three main service products to fulfil different customers’ needs. The company promises to response calls within 24 hours, works at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and offers 24 hours emergency services. Flexibility can also create diversification to operations which can reduce operation risks and keep its growth.
If the company can serve at the lowest cost in the industry, it can mark a lower price among competitors but still making profit. The lowest cost company can earn substantial profits while those competitors in the market are earning comparative smaller profits, or even a loss if the competitors attempt competed based on the price.
The five performance objectives combined with many measures and they can be interdependent to each other. All of these factors may give rise to partial view of operation performance if they are viewed individually. However, some of them may be overlapped in terms of the information they included.
There are criteria to judge those factors :-
Quality
• Number and Seriousness of customer complaints • Mean time between two failures • Survey on the customer satisfaction
Speed
• The respond time to the customers’ site • The respond time to 24 hours emergency services • The average time for maintenance • The respond time to delivery
Dependability
• The ability to finish the job in first visit • The ability to send technicians in scheduled or promised time. • Proportion of scheduled appointment cancelled due to lack of technicians.
Flexibility
• Range of products/services provided • Time to change schedules • Average and maximum capacity to the workforce
Cost
• Technician productivity • Cost per operation hour
Ensuring product services provided can meet/exceed customers’ needs, service technician plays an important role. There are some requirements and necessary skills for them to get job done efficiency and meet customers’ needs :- Technical Skills >> The technician who has better technical skill can provide higher quality. Finish job independently >> If the technician cannot work independently and always ask for helps, even he proposes high technical skills, a delay of job is seen. This will increase workload for the others, to the worst, the cost can be increased. Understand customers’ requirements >> If the technician does not know customers’ needs or specific requirements, he can not perform job efficiency. If the technician can do that, quality and dependability of service product can be enhanced. Trouble shooting skills >> The technician should able to target problems as soonest so as to perform faster service in more efficient way. Communication skills >> The technician should have communicate skill. A good communication skill results in quicker understanding and thus solving customers’ problems at once, that is enhancing the speed of service. Language skills >> As Ehrlich has 45 district offices in US, it could be better for technicians who speak other languages which lead a flexibility to serve more customers from different countries.
Following with a matrix of Quality Fiction Development for Ehrlich’s services:
O
O ● O
| | |How : Requirements for Pest Control Technician |
| |Importance to customers |Strong Technical skill |Can understand customer’s requirements |Communication skill |Language skill |Can finish the job independently | |What (Design Characteristics) |Quality | | ● | O | | | | | |Speed | | | | ● | | | | |Depend-ability | | O | | | | | | |Flexibility | | ● | ● | | ● | | | |Cost | | Δ | Δ | | | O | |
There are many ways of making improvement through different plans/programs, company is mostly attempt to provide a repeatable set of steps which a team or individual can learn and follow. PDCA (Plan, Do Check, Act) could be a good model for the improvement program.
Under commitment from top management of Ehrlich, the improvement team should be established and examples of improvement program as below:
Plan 1. Finding of problem/process which will be addressed and describe an improvement opportunity
Procedures included: • Look for switching important business indicators • Review customer data • Narrow down the focus and develop objectives
Assume Ehrlich is facing customer dissatisfactions. Top management reacted to form a mixed team included Direct Manager, Regional Manager and service Technicians to investigate the reasons and implement a corrective action for it. Pareto Chart can be used to analyse the customer complaints.
For Instance:
It is found that the customers are not happy with current customer contact process. It is happened the most frequent of customer complaints across regions. Thus, the team purposes an objective –
“to make customer contact in a more convenience way.”
2. Describe current process to identify improvement opportunity
Procedures included: • Select relevant process to define scope • Describe process under study
For Instance:
The team begins to understand overall process for delivering service and identify problems which contributed to focus. The team uses a flow chart to determine the process (Flowcharts that shown in previous page).
It is obvious that customers may need to spend times for finding a right district phone no. before placing a call. Thus, can only a toll free hot line be provided to the customers instead?
3. Describe all possible causes of problems and agree on root causes.
Identify and gather facts and opinions for the causes of problems, confirm pinions on root causes with data support whenever possible.
Situation:
The team may brainstorm all the possible outcome to this situation, in such, possible cause of pattern can be revealed. Fishbone diagram or why-why analysis can be used in this situation.
4. Develop an effective, workable solution and action plan, including target for improvement. • Define and rank solutions • Plan the change process , “What?, Who? When? • Contingency plan is established when dealing with new and risky plans • Set targets for improvement and establish monitoring methods
For instance, the customer contact process can be simplified to enhance an efficiency by :
a) customers are provided one toll free hot line only to centralize the incoming calls.
[pic]
b) the process of customer query can be simplified as :
Yes Finish
No
Yes Finish
No
If the process can be simplified as above, each technician assigned can be served some particular customers and handled by themselves.
Do
5. Implement solution or process change. (From my past experience, it could be better to try solution in a small scale first)
Check
6. Review and evaluate results of the changes
Confirm and establish in the means of monitoring the changes/solutions. It is necessary to determine any unintended consequence. In some circumstances, the measurement is not valid and negative impacts may be seen.
For instance:
Some technicians are too busy to handle most customers, but some may have not many to handle. Or, some technicians even do not have enough technical skills to handle assigned jobs. Without monitoring/check, the team does not know about this. To adjust this situation, workload is reassigned, more trainings and technical information is necessary to be provided to appropriated technicians.
Act
7. Reflect and act on learning
The team can access the result and problem solving process. Changes/improvement can be recommended and continued when needs. If possible, standardize the process.
Eventually, the PDCA process should be run over again to get continue improvement processes. The increment of a “little” improvement can end up a good operation performance.
Reference :
Slack N., Chambers, Operations Management (fifth edition), Prentice Hall. Chapter 1 to 8, 18
~ The End & Thank you ~
----------------------- Toll free hot line or
45 local district offices’ phone no. provided to customers
Report Pest Control for residential or commercial customers (District Offices)
Enquiry and customer complaints (Regional Headquarter -Comm. Dept)
Receptionist understands query
Technical advice (Regional Headquarter-Technical Team)
Customer enquiry thru phone call
Put through to Manager
Send another technician
Technician at customer’s site
Arrange technician to site visit
Check customer status
Put through to appropriated technician
Answer query over the phone
Problem solving
Manager understands query
What Vs Hows
Ï% Strong relationship
O Medium relationship
” Week relationship
Hows Vs Hows
Ï% Strong Positive
O Positive
* Negative
” Strong Negative
Toll free hot line
Enquiry and● Strong relationship
O Medium relationship
Δ Week relationship
Hows Vs Hows
● Strong Positive
O Positive
* Negative
Δ Strong Negative
Toll free hot line
Enquiry and customer complaints (Regional Headquarter -Comm. Dept)
Report Pest Control for residential or commercial customers (District Offices)
Technical advice (Regional Headquarter-Technical Team)
Customer enquiry received thru phone call
Put through to appropriated technician
Problem solving
Technician at customer’s site
Arrange technician to site visit
Answer query over the phone
Check customer status by receptionist
Send another technician
The Core Function Activities of Ehrlich :-
|Core Function Activities | |
|Marketing & Sales |Promote services to customers |
|Service Department |Design new services to meet customers’ needs |
|Operations …show more content…
|Provide technical services to customers for good quality |
Operations as described in a form of “Input – Transformation – Output” processes in Ehrlich:-
|Input (Resources) |Transformation Process |Output |
|- Services Technicians |-Pest Control Services |-Pest Control for residential and |
|- Pest Control devices and |-Consultancy Services |commercial customers |
|materials |-Product Sales Services | |
Ehrlich is offering 3 different products only, such as “Pest Control for Residential Customers” , “Pest Control for Commercial Customers” and “Product Sales for Commercial Customers”.
Pest Control for Residential Customers
This is quick response and free consultation over a hot line or a quick on-site inspection, do pest control within an hour service. This service is only fit for residential customers and technical skills to service technicians for this service are relatively low as compared to “pest control for commercial customers”. In general, the contacts between technicians and customers were not much as one kind of pest killing spray can kill several common kinds of pests/insects in household. The technician normally gets brief information from hot line, inspects areas and do spray onto areas once they
arrive.
Pest Control for Commercial Customers
The Technician stays in customers’ sites. This service is common to customers as technician is needed to inspect and review the site before providing pest suggestion to the customers. Contact and communication between the technician and customers are relatively high. In general, highly skilled trained technicians will be assigned as requirements for technical skills of technicians are very high and different customers may expect different technical difficulties.
However, District Managers may feel headaches sometimes when shortage of high-skilled technicians making difficult in arrangements.
Product Sales for Commercial Customers
Product Sales are mainly for those customers with in-house pest control staffs. Ehrlich sells pest control materials for “do-it-yourself” through local district offices. When faced with pest problem, people will resolve it on their own and this service provides advice and materials for the job. Therefore, contact/communication will be the least among other two product services. Commercial organizations with trained applicators/pest control operators can purchase bulk materials through Ehrlich Distribution. Ehrlich, with fast delivery times promising shipments leave warehouses within 24 hours of order receipt. This makes a vast array of in-stock materials.
Analysis of service products by examining Volume, Variety, Variation in Demand and Visibility/Degree of Customer Contact are as following table. 1 mark -the lowest ; 5 marks- the highest.
|Service Products |Volume |Variety |Variation |Visibility/Degree of Customer |
| | | | |Contact |
|Pest Control for Residential |5 |1 |2 |1 |
|Customer | | | | |
|Pest Control for Commercial |1 |5 |5 |5 |
|Customer | | | | |
|Product Sales for Commercial |3 |3 |3 |1 |
|Customer | | | | |
It is obviously a big different between “Pest Control for Residential Customer” and “Pest Control for Commercial Customer”. The “Pest Control for Residential Customer” is nearly standardized and high repeatability step for which pest control materials used are almost the same, therefore; the variety is low and volume needs is high. Moreover, the customer contact is low as the technician only reviews the problem on-site after the consultation through hot line, and do spray pest materials onto the suspected areas. However, “Pest Control for Commercial Customer”, technician is needed to stay in customers’ sites increasing contact with customer and facing different problems everyday in different kinds of organizations (e.g. hotel, food plant, retailer and etc). Thus, less systemization, low standardization and high variation can be easily seen.
“Product Sales for Commercial Customer” is directly provided product services for those commercial customers with in-house pest control inspector. What pest control materials want is depended on in-house inspectors after inspecting their sites. Therefore, medium volume and variety are seen due to different commercials with different material needs for pest problems. A “degree of customer contact” is relatively low as commercial customers have experienced in-house pest control inspectors. Direction of use and functions of pest control materials may be enough to provide through customer’s hot line.
We would define these 3 service products into the below process types:-
|Service Products |Process Types |Volume |Variety |
|Pest Control for Residential |Mass Service |High |Low |
|Customer | | | |
|Pest Control for Commercial |Professional Service |Low |High |
|Customer | | | |
|Product Sales for Commercial |Service Shop |Medium |Medium |
|Customer | | | |
Customers contact to each product services are in different degrees. On-site technicians have highest customer contact among other 2 product services since the technician stays in customers’ sites all the day. They perform non-standard practice and it is crucial that a more experienced technician is being assigned to the job.
For the other 2 product services, customers can contact Ehrlich’s 45 district offices’ phone no. or a toll free hot line:
[pic]
Customers can dial a toll free hot line or local district offices’ phone numbers. Based on record, about 88% of customers made right calls to district offices dealing with pest control issues, such as report of pests in house, commercial consultation, change appointment date or complaints about inefficiency of pest control materials being used. About 5% calls were made incorrectly to the District offices. The remaining 7% was unknown.
Customer query process :-
No
Yes Yes
Yes Finish
No/ Safer to visit
Yes Finish
No
In order to provide high quality service, crucial points in each stage are stated in the bellow :-
|Process Stages |Crucial issue(s) to each stage |
|Receptionist understands query? |Make sure receptionist is patient, helpful and fully understand |
| |the customers’ needs. She may have some technical knowledge, thus|
| |know capabilities of the technicians. |
|Manager understands query? |Make sure manager is patient enough to understand customers |
| |especially when the customers start getting trouble on pest |
| |control materials/services provided previously. |
|Put through to appropriated technician |Make sure to connect to right person. Customers would upset when |
| |their calls are transferred around the office but still nobody |
| |can help. Thus, “choose right person at the first time” is |
| |important in this stage. |
|Check customers status |Ensure customer status is still active. |
|Arrange technician to site visit |Ensure to send a suitable technician. For instants, it is not a |
| |good choice if technician is familiar with residential but send |
| |him to large industrial plant. |
|Technician arrived at customer’s site |The technician should arrive within scheduled time. He should |
| |also well equipped with “right” materials and instruments. |
|Problem solving |Solve the problems as efficiency as possible. |
|Send another technician if problem cannot be solved |Ensure the second technician understood the problem before go. If|
| |possible, the second technician has to finish the job. |
In general, customers would like products at the lowest price with highest quality, greatest customization, fastest response and highly reliable on the services. Therefore, the performance of each service products could be based on the performance objectives, namely “Quality, Speed, Dependability, Flexibility and Cost”.
Quality is characteristics and features of product/service which can satisfy customers’ needs. It means “do things right” although it means different things in different operations. Good quality will always reduce potential risks from errors and cost, especially rework and scrap cost. It can also retain customers, less complains, work more efficiency, thus cost saving is achieved. Importantly, by knowing customers’ needs and standard set to you, company can provide good quality to customers.
Fast response service can avoid any unnecessary delay to customers. Either residential or commercial customers would like to solve pest problems as soon as possible for resuming their normal life or operations. Fast delivery is also important for customer is running out of stock. Time is money, especially in commercial sectors who do not want to delay their productions/operations.
Dependability ensures customers highly rely on the service. Maintaining promises would be a good example of it.
Flexibility allows variation of service products available. Ehrlich offers three main service products to fulfil different customers’ needs. The company promises to response calls within 24 hours, works at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and offers 24 hours emergency services. Flexibility can also create diversification to operations which can reduce operation risks and keep its growth.
If the company can serve at the lowest cost in the industry, it can mark a lower price among competitors but still making profit. The lowest cost company can earn substantial profits while those competitors in the market are earning comparative smaller profits, or even a loss if the competitors attempt competed based on the price.
The five performance objectives combined with many measures and they can be interdependent to each other. All of these factors may give rise to partial view of operation performance if they are viewed individually. However, some of them may be overlapped in terms of the information they included.
There are criteria to judge those factors :-
Quality
• Number and Seriousness of customer complaints • Mean time between two failures • Survey on the customer satisfaction
Speed
• The respond time to the customers’ site • The respond time to 24 hours emergency services • The average time for maintenance • The respond time to delivery
Dependability
• The ability to finish the job in first visit • The ability to send technicians in scheduled or promised time. • Proportion of scheduled appointment cancelled due to lack of technicians.
Flexibility
• Range of products/services provided • Time to change schedules • Average and maximum capacity to the workforce
Cost
• Technician productivity • Cost per operation hour
Ensuring product services provided can meet/exceed customers’ needs, service technician plays an important role. There are some requirements and necessary skills for them to get job done efficiency and meet customers’ needs :- Technical Skills >> The technician who has better technical skill can provide higher quality. Finish job independently >> If the technician cannot work independently and always ask for helps, even he proposes high technical skills, a delay of job is seen. This will increase workload for the others, to the worst, the cost can be increased. Understand customers’ requirements >> If the technician does not know customers’ needs or specific requirements, he can not perform job efficiency. If the technician can do that, quality and dependability of service product can be enhanced. Trouble shooting skills >> The technician should able to target problems as soonest so as to perform faster service in more efficient way. Communication skills >> The technician should have communicate skill. A good communication skill results in quicker understanding and thus solving customers’ problems at once, that is enhancing the speed of service. Language skills >> As Ehrlich has 45 district offices in US, it could be better for technicians who speak other languages which lead a flexibility to serve more customers from different countries.
Following with a matrix of Quality Fiction Development for Ehrlich’s services:
O
O ● O
| | |How : Requirements for Pest Control Technician |
| |Importance to customers |Strong Technical skill |Can understand customer’s requirements |Communication skill |Language skill |Can finish the job independently | |What (Design Characteristics) |Quality | | ● | O | | | | | |Speed | | | | ● | | | | |Depend-ability | | O | | | | | | |Flexibility | | ● | ● | | ● | | | |Cost | | Δ | Δ | | | O | |
There are many ways of making improvement through different plans/programs, company is mostly attempt to provide a repeatable set of steps which a team or individual can learn and follow. PDCA (Plan, Do Check, Act) could be a good model for the improvement program.
Under commitment from top management of Ehrlich, the improvement team should be established and examples of improvement program as below:
Plan 1. Finding of problem/process which will be addressed and describe an improvement opportunity
Procedures included: • Look for switching important business indicators • Review customer data • Narrow down the focus and develop objectives
Assume Ehrlich is facing customer dissatisfactions. Top management reacted to form a mixed team included Direct Manager, Regional Manager and service Technicians to investigate the reasons and implement a corrective action for it. Pareto Chart can be used to analyse the customer complaints.
For Instance:
It is found that the customers are not happy with current customer contact process. It is happened the most frequent of customer complaints across regions. Thus, the team purposes an objective –
“to make customer contact in a more convenience way.”
2. Describe current process to identify improvement opportunity
Procedures included: • Select relevant process to define scope • Describe process under study
For Instance:
The team begins to understand overall process for delivering service and identify problems which contributed to focus. The team uses a flow chart to determine the process (Flowcharts that shown in previous page).
It is obvious that customers may need to spend times for finding a right district phone no. before placing a call. Thus, can only a toll free hot line be provided to the customers instead?
3. Describe all possible causes of problems and agree on root causes.
Identify and gather facts and opinions for the causes of problems, confirm pinions on root causes with data support whenever possible.
Situation:
The team may brainstorm all the possible outcome to this situation, in such, possible cause of pattern can be revealed. Fishbone diagram or why-why analysis can be used in this situation.
4. Develop an effective, workable solution and action plan, including target for improvement. • Define and rank solutions • Plan the change process , “What?, Who? When? • Contingency plan is established when dealing with new and risky plans • Set targets for improvement and establish monitoring methods
For instance, the customer contact process can be simplified to enhance an efficiency by :
a) customers are provided one toll free hot line only to centralize the incoming calls.
[pic]
b) the process of customer query can be simplified as :
Yes Finish
No
Yes Finish
No
If the process can be simplified as above, each technician assigned can be served some particular customers and handled by themselves.
Do
5. Implement solution or process change. (From my past experience, it could be better to try solution in a small scale first)
Check
6. Review and evaluate results of the changes
Confirm and establish in the means of monitoring the changes/solutions. It is necessary to determine any unintended consequence. In some circumstances, the measurement is not valid and negative impacts may be seen.
For instance:
Some technicians are too busy to handle most customers, but some may have not many to handle. Or, some technicians even do not have enough technical skills to handle assigned jobs. Without monitoring/check, the team does not know about this. To adjust this situation, workload is reassigned, more trainings and technical information is necessary to be provided to appropriated technicians.
Act
7. Reflect and act on learning
The team can access the result and problem solving process. Changes/improvement can be recommended and continued when needs. If possible, standardize the process.
Eventually, the PDCA process should be run over again to get continue improvement processes. The increment of a “little” improvement can end up a good operation performance.
Reference :
Slack N., Chambers, Operations Management (fifth edition), Prentice Hall. Chapter 1 to 8, 18
~ The End & Thank you ~
----------------------- Toll free hot line or
45 local district offices’ phone no. provided to customers
Report Pest Control for residential or commercial customers (District Offices)
Enquiry and customer complaints (Regional Headquarter -Comm. Dept)
Receptionist understands query
Technical advice (Regional Headquarter-Technical Team)
Customer enquiry thru phone call
Put through to Manager
Send another technician
Technician at customer’s site
Arrange technician to site visit
Check customer status
Put through to appropriated technician
Answer query over the phone
Problem solving
Manager understands query
What Vs Hows
Ï% Strong relationship
O Medium relationship
” Week relationship
Hows Vs Hows
Ï% Strong Positive
O Positive
* Negative
” Strong Negative
Toll free hot line
Enquiry and● Strong relationship
O Medium relationship
Δ Week relationship
Hows Vs Hows
● Strong Positive
O Positive
* Negative
Δ Strong Negative
Toll free hot line
Enquiry and customer complaints (Regional Headquarter -Comm. Dept)
Report Pest Control for residential or commercial customers (District Offices)
Technical advice (Regional Headquarter-Technical Team)
Customer enquiry received thru phone call
Put through to appropriated technician
Problem solving
Technician at customer’s site
Arrange technician to site visit
Answer query over the phone
Check customer status by receptionist
Send another technician