Queue Types

There are three major types of physical queue configurations: multiple queues, single queue, and take-a-number queue.  Queue configuration tells us what a queue looks like.

Some basic queue configurations

A single queue system is sometimes called a snake queue. You often see these at airports.

A multiple queue system is often used in supermarkets and retail outlets.

This queue at the rugby sevens is a multiple queue.

Rugby Sevens queue at Westpac stadium in Wellington New Zealand

A 'take-a-number' queue is often seen at restaurants/bars, fast food places like Fish and Chip shops, and sometimes also at banks. A take-a-number type queue operates at 'Just Cuts', a franchised hairdressing salon. No appointments are taken, but your name is put into a 'line' on their computer (using the FCFS First-Come-First-Served rule) and they can tell you the approximate wait time so you can go off and do other things while you wait. Types of take-a-number technologies are improving and becoming more common. E.g. at busy one-stop-shop customer service centers.

Often a combination of queuing configurations can be seen. The above queue at the Rugby Sevens, although a multiple queue, is also like a snake queue.

Poka-yoke Devices - McDonald's

Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that means 'fail-safe' or 'mistake-proofing'. Originally called baka-yoke which means fool-proofing or idiot-proofing, the name was changed to a milder form of admonishment!  The point of a poka-yoke device is to provide a check-point to ensure a service can take place without hiccups. 

Imagine you are driving down a road. Down the middle of the road there are cats' eyes, slightly raised bumps that will make a noise and cause the car to judder, to give you a sudden reminder you have drifted into the wrong lane. On the outside of the road is the curb, which if you touch or hit will also remind you that you have strayed from the path you should be traveling. This is a type of Poka-yoke. Poka-yokes are everywhere once you start noticing them!

McDonald's

A Drive through Poka-yoke - Don't drive through the drive-through if your vehicle is over 2.7m high!

McDonald's uses the self-service principle and so they need to manage the behaviour of customers in their premises to keep them clean. Rubbish bins are placed near doors and in alleyways so that customers are reminded to place their rubbish in the receptacle when they leave. In McDonald's you are expected to clean your own table and so placement of rubbish bins here is a designed-in Poka-yoke device.   

Some more examples people have collected are here and also here.

More information about poka-yoke and its relationship to lean thinking management can be found here.

Poka-Yoke Devices - Hotels

Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that means 'fail-safe' or 'mistake-proofing'. Originally called baka-yoke which means fool-proofing or idiot-proofing, the name was changed to a milder form of admonishment!  The point of a poka-yoke device is to provide a check-point to ensure a service can take place without hiccups. Simple check-lists are examples, but there are also numerous devices you see every day but you may not realize they are an integral part of ensuring a service process runs smoothly.

Poka-yoke devices are devices built into a service process to minimize customer error.

Hotels are designed with the same principle in mind; minimize the likelihood of a user mistake through good design.  A patron is undergoing a journey through a hotel process. The journey the hotel offers is the same for everyone - basically a room for the night. In order for this process to be carried out with greatest efficiency and effectiveness, and because hotels' capital investment is mainly in the facility, the facility is designed to minimize the likelihood of anyone straying outside of the process. Ways patrons might stray outside the process include; stealing stuff, damaging stuff, losing stuff (like their keys), getting lost, hurting themselves (falling over in their room), wasting power or water, misusing the room (sneaking people in, cooking etc..) and so on (use your imagination!).     

On a recent business trip to Wellington, I stayed in an Ibis Hotel, and I photographed some simple Poka-yoke devices in my room in order to show how hotel design minimizes the likelihood of process errors. 

Some of the poka-yoke points include:

1. The hotel lifts will only operate if I use my room key card to enable the lift. This is a security measure to ensure non-patrons cannot enter into room areas easily, helping to prevent theft. The lifts are within the sightline of the front-desk meaning it is difficult to sneak stuff into your room that shouldn't be there (like extra people).  
2. When inside the room, you must place your key card into the slot shown below in order to enable power to the room including lights. This also means that when you leave the room and take your key card the lights to the room are turned off, meaning power is not wasted. It also means you are unlikely to forget your card. Your room will not lock unless the card is removed. 

3. You will notice that almost all hotel rooms have clothes hangers that detach leaving the hook behind. This is designed to stop patrons stealing clothes hangers.

4. Electrical appliances like irons and hair dryers are often wired into the wall. Again this stops them being stolen but also helps stop misuse (i.e. putting electrical appliances in water which is really dangerous).

5. Another simple design feature is to make all furnishings out of hard-wearing durable fabrics and materials, that are also easy to keep clean, and if a mark is made, not easy to see. So, for instance, carpets are often dark colors, in patterns and textures that minimize the appearance of wear and tear. 

  

Core and Supplementary Services

A core service is simply the fundamental service that the service is providing. A supplementary service is anything that could be considered an extra on top of that basic service. 

So for example, for a hotel, the core service would be providing a bed. The supplementary services are the services that add to that core experience. 

Supplementary services could include laundry services, business services, conference facilities, dining room, gymnasium, pool, mini-golf, vending machines, bar and so on. 

Defining what is core and supplementary can be difficult for many services as what might be considered supplementary comes to be considered core (e.g. McDonald's cafes were supplementary and are now a core part of their service). 

Services can also innovate around this idea by providing extra services or even stripping down service to its bare essentials. E.g. the Japanese capsule hotels - see below. 

Upside Down Service Pyramid

Inverted (or Upside Down) Service Pyramid 

In service management, it is common to hear talk of the upside-down or inverted service pyramid. The idea of the inverted service pyramid is that the traditional way of drawing organizational structure is inverted so that customers are at the top and the CEO and senior management are at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy. This is a very powerful way of illustrating the primary importance of service logic. This inversion symbolically represents the service ethic, or the service logic or the priorities service organisations should use and communicate to staff regarding their value system and culture. Supervisors, managers and even the CEO's primary role is to support front-line employees to deliver services to the customer. This is also a useful diagram to illustrate the principle of service leadership. 

Traditional organisational structure and inverted service pyramid

Ishikawa/Cause-Effect/Fish Bone Diagram

Ishikawa/Cause-Effect/Fish Bone Diagram

... is a fault identification process.

... is a guided brainstorming process.

The Ishikawa Chart is an excellent tool for evaluating a process. Commonly known as the Cause and Effect Diagram, Ishikawa charts are a method of charting and evaluating all the inputs for a given process. Once all the inputs have been charted, each can be evaluated as a source of variation in the overall process.

The following diagram shows the basic format of the Ishikawa chart (there are other formats but this one best suits our purposes). You can also use the STEMCF (Inputs) as the bones (from Johnston, Clark and Shulver textbook).

The process involves identifying every input to the problem using about six headings. The process involves a high degree of thinking about the process and will often generate a number of sub-lines and sub-sub-lines.

The final Cause and Effect Diagram looks like a fishbone.

Moment Mapping

Moment Mapping is a term used to describe how managers can learn to see the customer experience from the customer's point of view. Moment mapping involves recording or collecting information about each interaction a customer goes through n a typical process. This information can then be used to drive process improvement.

The following video is really helpful to understand the power of moment mapping. A Norwich Union Insurance manager describes how the company used a customer experience moment mapping technique (provided by a consultant) to experience their own service as if they were a customer. From the experience, they learned how to simplify their claims process, cut costs, increase profitability and increase customer satisfaction levels.

Service Process Mapping/Service Blueprinting/Swim-lane Diagramming

Service process mapping is also sometimes called service blueprinting or swim-lane diagramming. Services are intangible processes involving emotions and experiences across a series of touchpoints. Service managers make these intangible experiences, processes, and feelings tangible so they can be managed and shared. Ways of making these intangible things tangible include: through stories, technologies, the service concept, and through process diagrams.

One of the main ways that the service experience can be envisaged is through process mapping.

Service Process Mapping and Service Blueprinting

The presentation below provides an overview of the purposes of service process mapping or blueprinting and its conventions. Plentiful examples of maps or blueprints can be seen here at google images.

In more recent times we have seen the development of cloud process services, such as Promapp. PROMAPP is a process management software business that helps companies build, improve and share their process knowledge from a central online repository.

Basically, Promapp drives process improvement by 'simplifying' process mapping, so that business teams can own and improve their own processes. According to their website Promapp makes process mapping: Easy to use for the whole team; it generates process maps from text; it uses a simple  process map format; it enables service providers to drill down to detail and related documents; it tracks all  changes; it is browser-based (cloud); and it is easy to implement and use. They also integrate with common quality systems like Lean Six Sigma. 

You can find Promapp online here - their website is very informative and attractive. They provide services to a large range of public and private companies including SkyCity, SkyTV, Zespri, Toyota, St John, Telstra Clear, Genesis Energy, McDonald's, Burger King, Auckland Transport and other local and international companies.

Swim-lane Diagram
A similar way to represent a process is with a swim-lane process diagram. A swim-lane is a visual diagram used to illustrate a process flow, and so it is an invaluable tool in helping organisational members visualize a whole process, of which they are probably only a small part. Flowcharts can distinguish sub-processes and responsibilities. They can be arranged either horizontally or vertically.

The swim lane diagram looks like a swimming pool, hence its name. The horizontal direction represents the sequence of events in the overall process, while the vertical divisions depict what sub-process is performing that step. Arrows between the lanes represent how information or material is passed between the sub-processes.

Swim-lane diagrams are often created with software like Microsoft Visio. This is a common application used by operations and other managers to create and communicate processes.

Below is a swim-lane diagram for a simple sales process. The task responsibilities are categorized as consumer, sales, stock, and finance. 

Reference

Bitner, M.J., Ostrom, A. & Morgan, F. (2007) Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. Center for Services Leadership, Arizona State University, Working Paper.

Service winners, losers and qualifiers

One group of concepts that can be useful are the terms service winners, service losers and service qualifiers.

To be a service qualifier is to meet the minimum requirement to compete in that service class or industry. There can be regulations around qualifying. For instance, in order to practice as a chartered accountant, one needs to be a qualified chartered accountant, and this profession has various regulations and professional standards that are required before you can set up an operation in this category of businesses. Often there are many informal and formal barriers to entry to be a qualifier in a service class.

A service loser is a service provider who fails in some way to provide an adequate standard of service in their class. This often means failing on the 'hygiene and critical' (Johnston, Clark and Shulver, 2012) quality factors. These are the quality factors that, if they are not present, dissatisfy the customer. For instance, finding mice in a children's playground at a fast food restaurant (as happened recently in Auckland at a McDonald's), or two major international aircraft disasters in the same year (as unfortunately happened to Malaysian Air in 2014). At McDonald's, the failure was in cleanliness and hygiene, and for the airline it was safety. Generally speaking, a service would only fail if they consistently did not reach an adequate standard of performance in their crucial aspects. Most businesses would recover eventually, even from such tragedies as aircraft crashes, but the losses in reputation and financial sustainability can be quite profound.

A service winner is understood as the best at service in a particular class of businesses. So, for instance, McDonald's is often seen as the service winner in fast food. What McDonald's does is often copied by other fast-food restaurants (e.g. drive through, self-service kiosks, cafes, etc.). In budget hotels, Ibis is a service winner. In airlines, Air New Zealand, Singapore Air and Emirates are all arguably service winners.  

Outcome and process quality

Useful concepts in service management are technical (outcome) and functional (process) aspects of quality. Service quality has technical and functional dimensions. Grönroos (2010) differentiates between two aspects of the service offering:  the technical quality of the service and the functional quality of the process. You can understand this through the example of hairdressing.

Technical service quality  (outcome)

Functional process quality (process)

Service can be understood as a 'bundle' of processes with both functional and technical dimensions.

Understanding what Grönroos is driving at with respect to outcome and process dimensions is

easier to understand if we see it through another example. See the airplanes below: imagine both are flying an Auckland-Melbourne route. One is an Air New Zealand flight. The other is a Jetstar flight.

Both flights have the same process outcome - they both will take you to Melbourne. However, they compete with each other for your attention around their process - or their functional quality and on price. Jetstar is known as a budget airline and so their service is more stripped down. This does not mean that their process has less quality - you get what you expect and pay for. Air New Zealand also offers economy flights, but their reputation relies a lot on excellent service and so you expect a bit more. Their pricing reflects this expectation.

Reference

Grönroos C. (2010) Service management and marketing: Customer management in service competition, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

Co-production of service or 'co-creation'

'Co-production of service', or 'co-creation' are key concepts in service management.

These concepts illustrated below using building bikes as an example.

Watch the two videos below, both about the building of bikes. The first is from the British Film Council and is an historical film about 'How a bicycle is made' . The film shows a manufacturing production process for bikes in 1945.  Then watch Video 2; 'The Inverted Bike Shop'.

Note how the relationship approaches between the producer and consumer are completely different. In the first video, the factory production processes of making bikes infer mass marketing approaches to sell them. The consumer needs to be persuaded to buy the product, and individuals buying the units are anonymous.

The second video shows a relationship marketing approach (see Chapter 4 of Johnston, Clark, and Shulver, 2012). The video shows how value is created in tandem with the consumer; the consumer is co-creating value with the bike shop. In Video 2 the producer develops resources to support the customer's value creation. Value is created by the consumer with the support of the producer.

One process has not replaced the other. Bikes are still mass-produced in exactly the same way as that shown in the first 1945 film; this is just more likely to happen in  China than Britain! However, Video 2, 'The Inverted Bike Shop' does indicate the way things have progressed regarding the importance of customer service in production. Co-creation of value is now a central idea in all serve innovation.

How a Bicycle is Made (1945) from British Council Film on Vimeo.

The Inverted Bike Shop from Show Love on Vimeo.