CASE STUDY

Case Study

Case Study

Part A

The director of Administration and Corporate Services and her team can ensure they provide an effective administration service to achieve Accent's commitment to excellence by incorporating the following ways and strategies.

From a strategic human resource management perspective, an organisation's human resource management strategy must be integrated with the business strategy to ensure that the human resource management practices add value to the organisation. There are various ways to ensure that link among which the notion of a bundle of HR best practices that would enhance the performance of the organisation by blending together and develop a synergy towards generating competitive advantage. This bundle of HR best practices have been referred to under several concepts namely high involvement management and high commitment management captured under the term of high performance work systems.

To hire for service competencies and service inclination, organisations should ensure that they select the best people with skills and knowledge for the job as well as holding an interest in performing service related work reflected in the right attitudes to service and orientation to serving customers and others on the job. Russ-Eft (2004) identified customer service competencies within the SERVE model (See the big picture and how customer service fits into it; Establish an authentic human connection with each customer; Render timely, accurate and thorough service; Value and respond to unique customer needs; and Extend a hand to repair and strengthen relationships with customers who are upset and angry). Service inclination implies that the right candidates should possess personality traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to experience, extroversion, empathy, self-efficacy authenticity, the need for activity, self-control, and adjustment.

Setting the Process Improvement Strategy

Define the scope or process to improve - When setting the process improvement strategy it is useful to define the scope of the process, as in many cases to tackle the whole supply chain or process can be difficult and put a great deal of strain on the operation or lean team. Once the scope is defined it is useful to gauge customer satisfaction with the product range, service, and product quality or defects. These customer side issues highlighted during these discussions can provide focus areas to address first. Employees and production staff are also an excellent source of information and idea brainstorming for areas to improve within the production or service process as they will have an intimate understanding of the plant and process (Tsang, 2000, Pp. 326).

Understand the process - In setting the process improvement strategy the operations or lean manufacturing team must first and most importantly understand the process, by the process we refer to the value adding chain that commences at raw materials all the way to finish goods. Process analysis and value stream mapping become very handy in this step. The importance of this stage cannot be stressed enough, as decisions and strategies set in place by managers, lean managers/champions, or engineers on lack of understanding can be detrimental to operations and business. The use of KPI's and performance measurement tools can ...