Transferring best practices between the manufacturing and service sectors (including invited contributions from the 16th EUROMA Conference) – Part 2

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 21, Issue 4

This is the second part of a special issue of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management on the transfer of best practices between the manufacturing and the service sector.

The first part of this special issue focused on the idea of an emerging theory of operations management fusion, whereby the various tools, techniques and concepts of operations management can be applied interchangeably in either a manufacturing or a service environment. Here, we hope to develop this idea further and explore some of the issues that arise when these tools and concepts are used in this way.

Papers which concern the application of existing operations management tools and techniques are always of interest as there are inevitably lessons to be learned from comparing theory with practice. Hence, application papers are not necessarily concerned with theoretical development per se, but with generating a body of understanding about how, when and where the tools and techniques they utilise can be applied most successfully. It is particularly interesting to note that some of the most useful application papers are those which highlight the various issues and problems that arise when applying a straightforward and“clean” set of theoretical tools into a typically messy and chaotic,but highly practical and pragmatic operations environment, rather than those that simply illustrate a perfect “textbook” scenario.

The importance of research which investigates the application of concepts and tools in a real world environment lies in its ability to examine the contextual issues that surround implementation, from organisation size, to cultural context, bureaucratic structure or process type and organisation. From the papers presented here, it seems that these issues are perhaps at least as important as the simple differentiation between services and manufacturing in understanding operations management in practice.

Our first two papers look at the implications of crossovers between manufacturing and services and vice versa. First, Marisa K. Smith, Peter D. Ball, Umit S. Bititci, and Robert van der Meer ask whether contact centres can continue to build their futures from lessons learned in manufacturing,suggesting that a systems thinking approach, coupled with a culture of continuous improvement are essential ingredients for the successful crossover of manufacturing improvement techniques to a contact centre context.

In the second paper, Veronica Martinez, Marko Bastl, Jennifer Kingston and Stephen Evans look at transforming a manufacturing organisation into a product service provider. Their research suggests that servitization relies on a number of “pillars”, including the culture of the manufacturing organisation, their ability to integrate with suppliers and customers and to organise internal processes effectively.

The next set of papers discuss applications process management concepts to the service sector. In the third paper, Biao Yang, Ying Yang and Sharon Williams focus on postponement and the challenges of using postponement in service operations, demonstrating how the concept can be applied through a re-positioning of the service push-pull boundary and through moving the line of visibility to achieve improved service process performance.

In the fourth paper (an invited contribution from the 16th EUROMA conference), Roy Stratton and Alex Knight provide an example of the application of the theory of constraints to hospital departments, highlighting the critical challenges of finding appropriate process control signals and managing process flow in a complex hospital context.

In the fifth paper (an invited contribution from the 16th EUROMA conference),Andreas Hellström, Svante Lifvergren and Johan Quist discuss an often overlooked issue in the research about transferring best practices to the service sector: the importance of organisational variables. They highlight through their case study that hospitals are often based on a professional bureaucracy rather than the machine bureaucracy form of organisation common in manufacturing settings. This has profound implications on understanding the difficulty of transferring practices and raises questions about the feasibility of these transfers.

Finally, in another invited contribution from the 16th EUROMA conference,Catarina Delgado, Marlene Ferreira and Manuel Castelo Branco present a case study of lean Six Sigma implementation in GE Money, Portugal illustrating the international cultural context within which this implementation took place.

Through these papers, we see discussions about contextual organisational differences ranging from cultural challenges to process management issues and bureaucratic diversity. What these papers really demonstrate is that although operations management tools can be used interchangeably between services and manufacturing, a focus on the organisational context in which they will be implemented is perhaps the fundamental requirement and is one that simply cannot be ignored.

From the research content of this two-part special issue on the transfer of best practices between manufacturing and services, it is interesting to highlight a conceptualisation of operations management research as existing at two-levels complementing and informing each other:

• 1.

  An abstract, system theory level, where it is possible to study manufacturing and service systems indiscriminately, comparatively, or conjointly.

• 2.

  A more practical level rooted in contingency theory where theories and laws from the system-level are made sense of, customised, and applied.

Michel Leseure, Melanie Hudson-SmithGuest Editors