The objective of this chapter is to describe how many of the supplier management practices of the U.S. automotive industry can provide learning points for those who manage service organizations. After a review of the four service sectors (distributive, producer, social, and personal services), we define supplier management. The three main functions within supplier management—control, improvement, and planning—are illustrated and discussed. The suppliers for a specific service are even more diverse than those cited for an automotive OEM; many services use suppliers from each of the other service sectors. Consistent with automotive OEMs, service companies outsource all three categories of supplies—goods, services, and software—though the proportions and contribution of each supply category to operational excellence may differ. Service operations experience waste, and we review the accepted list of eight wastes for service operations, noting that each of these wastes could be caused by a supplier. Essential practices of supplier management for a service industry are organized around the concept of customer-supplier partnership, a six-step hierarchy first identified for automotive OEMs. With the addition of two more imperatives, assure service dependability and manage the service supply chain, we explain how these eight practices may be adapted to services.
Part of the book: Contemporary Issues and Research in Operations Management
The discipline of industrial engineering (IE) was originated in the US by Frederick W. Taylor, who first applied what he termed scientific management to machine shop management in the 1880s. IE expanded world-wide with applications of work measurement to all manner of manufacturing, then to services. A century later, as the Japanese practice of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) became known in the US, the associated equipment management metric Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) became well-known as a production metric that could be applied to individual manufacturing machines, production lines, and the overall production system. In this chapter, illustrations of the calculation of OEE are provided, along with modification of the three OEE inputs (availability, performance efficiency, and quality rate) to create a new service management metric Overall Service Effectiveness (OSE). Definitions and measures of service quality are reviewed. The first published application of OSE was to a city public transportation system, and is reviewed as a prototype. Essentially, applications of OSE require the industrial engineer to define service-specific measures of availability, processing rate, and quality at the management’s level of interest: work station, process, or system. The data collected to calculate OSE will also point toward actions that would improve OSE.
Part of the book: Concepts, Applications and Emerging Opportunities in Industrial Engineering