The services sector of business is different than the industrial manufacturing models that have been the primary references for the last century or so. Treating services businesses as if they were just a version of a manufacturer – just substituting the word “service” for “product” is a mistake, and leads to poor decisions and worse results. Trying to analyze and design services processes with the same tools and techniques used for manufacturing processes may give us some improvement in internal measures, but usually completely misses the mark in the perspective that really counts – that of the customer.
Where is SE today?
The few academic texts that deal with services are from the marketing and strategy disciplines. None are from engineering. The closest is “Six Sigma for Services,” which attempts to translate the measures and techniques that easily and comfortably apply to industrial product manufacturing processes. Essentially, there really is no discipline of “Services Engineering” today.
Yet, if we want to find ways to get the same levels of productivity and quality improvement in our services processes that came from applying industrial engineering practices to manufacturing processes, we desperately need to develop a service engineering discipline that is appropriate to deal with a business segment that employs over 77 percent of the labor force and contributes to nearly 80 percent of the gross domestic product in industrialized countries.
IBM has taken a leadership role in advancing academic research and attention to this topic (see www.research.ibm.com/ssme/). In 2005, IBM sponsored a conference on what their research group calls SSME or Services Science, Management, and Engineering. Research professors from top universities focused on issues such as improving productivity in services, the extended enterprise, and business strategy models. As more research is centered on services management and engineering, expect to see a more formal services engineering discipline emerge. I think this will be linked with BPM.
BPM Professionals & SE
What does all this have to do with BPM? Most of us probably work in a services industry or provide process management services to support processes that are inherently services-oriented processes to the organization’s primary processes. Given the overwhelming percentage of workers and industries that are primarily services companies, there are, de facto, more people looking at improving and redesigning services processes than doing so in manufacturing.
Services industries’ primary, or value chain, processes are inherently people focused. Not only is services delivery highly knowledge-worker-dependent, it is highly collaborative in all aspects, including delivering value to the customer which is co-produced by the provider and the customer. To me, this alone indicates that the high-value BPM tools and approaches must inherently be those that best support human tasks and operations.
Providing services is going to be the dominant model of business for the 21st century and BPM is going to be the dominant model of management. Services don’t transform (process) raw materials (inputs) into products (outputs). They are event-driven, non-linear, asynchronous, multi-threaded, complex, business relationships that evolve over time. Analyzing, modeling, simulating, designing and implementing service processes is going to take more effort and more care and ultimately will be more rewarding.
