LEAN MANAGEMENT

Lean Management Principles to a Call Centre That Undertakes Telephone Assessments



Lean Management Principles to a Call Centre That Undertakes Telephone Assessments

Literature Review

With rapidly changing workplaces, unique occupational health hazards are emerging. Traditional industrial health concerns were related more in the physical health domain. Emerging new occupations particularly in Information Technology (IT) and IT enabled Services (ITES), pose a host of new health challenges particularly those related to mental and social health.

For many employees in the call centre sector, "the daily experience is of repetitive, intensive and stressful work, which frequently results in employee "burnout". Call centres are establish to create an environment in which work can be standardized to create relatively uniform and repetitious activities to achieve economies of scale and consistent quality of customer service. This weakens employee autonomy and enhances the potential for management control. Loss of control generally understood to be an important indicator of work related stress (Lewis, 2000, 978). Lean principles are applied to military, service and construction industry. The principles of Lean are universal and have been applied successfully everywhere. Lean manufacturing is a best practice for today's manufacturers seeking to achieve operational excellence (Bhasin and Burcher, 2006, 98). The same, lean approach of stripping waste and non-value added activities out of manufacturing operations can be applied also to quality assurance, saving time and money in the process (Katayama and Bennet, 1996, 23).

Lean Operations

The important aspect of this system that is shown in the above figure requires fewer resources as inputs for manufacturing system(less material, fewer parts, shorter production operations, less unproductive time needed for set-ups, etc.) and at the side there is a higher pressure for producing higher output(better quality, higher technical specifications, greater product variety, etc.). The output, thus, results in greater satisfaction to the customer and provides the lean company an opportunity to grab a large market share and helps in the long run for the company (Shah and Ward, 2003, 149).

Lean Principles - Problem-Solving Approach

Lean principles are nothing but a problem solving approach to eliminate waste and can be used in any industry. Value is something that the ultimate customer can determine and can except a combination of goods and services. If there is a value, it means that nothing has wasted, and this determines the first principle. Value stream is the path the product follows from the raw materials to the finished product or in other words assessing the actions of converting the raw material to finished product that are required to deliver the product as specified by the customer.. It involves three business processes: problem solving (from design to product launch), information management (from order booking to delivery) and physical transformation (conversion of raw material to finish good). Once value stream is completed it will show steps that are immediately removable. This is an industry wide study rather than company-wide and should involve the assessment of the relationship with the suppliers of goods and services. It is the interactions between various stages of value ...