Planning the Service Delivery System

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CHAPTER 10
Planning the Service Delivery System
Learning Objectives:

After reading this chapter, you should understand:

How to plan, design, analyze, and check the hospitality organization’s
service delivery system.
How to design a delivery system using several methods, such as flow-
charting, blueprinting, the universal service map, and PERT/CPM.
How to use fishbone analysis, poka-yokes, and other methods to locate
the source of problems and prevent their occurrence or reoccurrence.
How to use a cross-functional organizational design to deliver a
service product.

PLANNING AND DESIGNING THE SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEM

We have said all along that the service delivery system includes all aspects of the service
experience4service product, service setting, and service delivery4and hospitality managers need to
think about the entire process that delivers the service to the guest and about the systems that are
needed to make the process work flawlessly. Developing a service product that meets guests’ needs
and having well-trained, motivated, enthusiastic employees using the right information, equipment,
and tools to deliver the product to guests within a well-designed service environment are all
necessary, but these are not sufficient. The key component of a flawless service experience is making
sure that the entire service delivery system, the process by which the service is delivered to the guest,
is designed so that it effectively integrates the many elements of the experience to make it happen in
the way that the customer expects.

Richard Metters and Ann Marucheck maintain that <the urgency for rigorous study to guide
service managers in improving the design, competitiveness, efficiency, and effectiveness of service
delivery, both at the firm and industry levels, has never been greater.=1 Achieving guest
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delight and avoiding service failure can both be greatly affected by delivery system design. Every
hospitality organization should spend whatever studying and planning time and energy it takes to get
the system right. It is a crucially important topic.

The total quality management movement, which emphasized that everyone is responsible for
quality4not just the quality control department4has taught organizational leaders several important
lessons. First, achieving total quality requires consideration of the entire system4from initial design, to
using whatever raw materials and inputs that are needed, to the finished product. Second, everyone is
responsible for delivering and monitoring quality; in hospitality, everyone is responsible for the
quality of the guest experience. Third, the system needs to be checked for problems before people are
blamed. Hospitality managers must find the root causes of problems and implement solutions to avoid
future problems, and these root causes often lie in the system.

Too many times, hospitality managers assume that the employee has made an error when in
reality the fault lies in a bad system, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the employee to
deliver the service experience with the excellence that the organization, the employee, and the guest
would like. Talk with frontline servers at hotels, restaurants, or any hospitality organization, and they
will tell you how frustrated they become when the service systems are inadequate for them to do the
jobs they are hired and paid to do, and which they really want to do well. When the service delivery
system fails, everyone loses. The guest is unhappy, the employee is frustrated, and the organization
may lose a guest and all the profits that the guest’s future business represents.

Behind the
scenes at a
busy
restaurant; a
service
delivery
system must
be carefully
planned to
ensure that
every guest is
delighted by
both the
service and
the service
product.

The Goal: Fail No Guest; Delight Every Guest

The hospitality manager must spend the extra time and effort to plan and organize the service delivery
system so that it works right every time. To achieve the companion goals of failing no guest and
delighting every guest, successfully planning the ent byire guest experience (the cycle of service) and
focusing on an effective delivery system are critical. While we don’t want to downplay the
contributions of production management techniques and the solutions that industrial engineers have
found for problems in manufacturing organizations, these tools cannot guarantee the success of any
hospitality organization’s service delivery system because the guest is always
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the ultimate judge of the quality and value of the guest experience. Service delivery system designers
must, therefore, ensure that they design the experience from the guest’s point of view and not their
own. Too many organizations design their service production processes for employee convenience or
efficiency. Although the system should be user-friendly for employees, the outstanding hospitality
providers organize the service around the guest’s needs, expectations, capabilities, and actual
behaviors. The delivery of any service should always be smooth, seamless, and transparent from the
guest’s point of view.

Some Guiding Principles

Given the goal of providing exceptional customer service, and learning from the lessons of The Ritz-
Carlton example (and indeed, all the examples in this book), here are some principles to keep in mind.
Study your customers in minute detail, build a service delivery system that will provide the experience
they expect from your organization, monitor that system closely, create accurate early-warning
measures for each possible failure point, engage everyone in the organization in watching those
measures, and follow up on everything that doesn’t meet your guests’ expectations for whatever
reason. If failures occur repeatedly at certain points, change the system design. If service standards are
unmet, find out why. If the organization has a service guarantee, be sure that the delivery system can
meet and exceed that guarantee.

Although excellent hospitality organizations do their best to keep service failures from
happening by keeping a careful eye on all the places where the system might fail, they know that
failures are inevitable. Therefore, they plan for how to recover from the inevitable failures. They
design systems that ensure success, avoid failure, and recover from failure on the key drivers of guest
satisfaction.

DEVELOPING THE SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEM

After almost fifty years of research, Joseph Juran published the Juran Trilogy in 1986. It defined the
three management processes that Juran thought were required by all organizations to improve: quality
planning, quality control, and quality improvement. Quality planning involves identifying customers,
determining their needs, creating a product or service to mee6t those needs, and then developing a
system to deliver the product or service. Quality control with respect to the hospitality industry means
making sure that the system is delivering the service in the most effective way. Errors as the product
or service is being delivered, whether due to inadequate planning or faulty execution, are prevented or
minimized through quality control. Quality improvement involves after-the-fact analysis of the errors
and failures that have contributed to poor quality and improving the delivery process to reduce or
eliminate future errors based on that analysis.

Planning the Delivery System, Monitoring the Service

Experience, and Assessing the Experience to Improve the
System
Phase I: Planning the Phase II: Monitoring the Phase III: Assessing the
Service Delivery System Service Experience Experience to Improve
the System
When Before the guest arrives, During the guest’s After the guest’s
and while the guest is experience experience
waiting for the service
experience
What Experience expected Experience realized Experience remembered
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Who Target customers Actual customers Past, current, and
potential future customers
How Setting service standards; Applying service Guest assessment:
blueprinting; Universal standards and job Comment cards; toll-free
Service Map; fishbone performance standards; 800 numbers; surveys (mail
analysis; PERT/CPM; managerial observation and Web, phone, critical
simulations; forecasting (MBWA); employee incidents);
demand; designing waits observation meeting terms of SERVQUAL; guest focus
(queues); training; quality service guarantees; personal groups; mystery shoppers
teams; poka-yokes; cross- interviews and encounters Other data review:
functional organizational with guests Service failure reports;
design service guarantee
utilization; interviews;
customer complaints by
category and type; employee
feedback; sales and revenue
reports; market share/
capacity utilization
Further review:
Organizational design;
service standards; training
methods
Refer findings back to
system planners

Planning the System

Any good delivery system begins with careful planning. Careful analysis and detailing of every step in
the entire service delivery process will make the difference between having it mostly right and
reaching the level of excellence that the very best service organizations deliver.

Service standards should be established early in the planning process. They are the
company’s expectations for how the different aspects of the service experience should be delivered
every time to every guest. And, as is true when setting individual goals (discussed in Chapter 7), the
criteria for service standards should be SMART: specific, measureable, attainable, results oriented,
and time bound.

Some standards are widely used in the hospitality industry: twenty minutes to get a room-
service breakfast, six minutes to check-in including waiting time, and less than that to get the first cup
of morning coffee in the hotel restaurant. A special type of service standards are those set by industry
associations or other agencies that establish certification, accreditation, and recognition standards.
Organizations or individuals are assessed on the degree to which they meet these standards and those
assessments are then made public. Most standards, however, are specific to the organizations setting
them and are designed to meet or beat the expectations of their targeted guests and often the
competition as well.

Monitoring the Service Experience

We have said before that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this is especially true of
service situations. Industrial engineers in manufacturing have taken methods measurement to the level
of a precise science. The service industry in general, and the hospitality industry in particular, have
lagged behind in understanding how to apply measurements to the largely
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intangible services that they offer. The need for measuring what is happening to the guest in every
step of service delivery is critical in assuring continuing guest satisfaction and, if problems arise, in
recognizing them, applying solutions, and in determining if the solutions have succeeded.

Organizations should measure the quality-of-service delivery against service standards

whenever possible. Such standards help to make the intangible experience tangible for purposes of
measurement and control. These standards, carefully created during the planning stage, are an
excellent way to focus everyone on what is important to the guest. Saying to a server <I think you
ought to work faster= is easy and might (or might not) improve the service experience of tonight’s
guests. However, in the long run, comparing a server’s performance from last month against target
levels for standards like <time until initial greeting,= <time for delivery of food or drink,= and <time
to bring the bill= can be much more helpful. Indeed, in the best circumstances, when the measures are
clear, fair, connected to providing excellence, and completely understood by the employees whose
performance is being measured, employees will be able to measure and manage themselves on certain
performance measurements. If done well, self-management through self-measurement is to
everyone’s benefit. If you teach employees what is important to their individual job success and then
train them to measure how they are performing on those critical factors, you have the beginnings of a
self-managing workforce and, when things go wrong, a self-healing system. Ideally, performance
measures make it possible for employees to monitor their own delivery effectiveness while actually
providing the service. If Kris Smith knows that the organizational maximum for answering her phone
is

Assessing the Experience and Improving the System

After planning the system and monitoring the experience through measurement comes the last step:
assessment and improvement. Collecting and analyzing information about what has actually occurred
drives system improvement. Once the plan is clearly laid out and the results of implementing that plan
adequately measured to yield insights into how well the system is operating, both management and
employees have the information needed to redesign the system and fix the problems to yield
continuing improvement in the guest experience.

The Blurred Lines

The table below shows that the lines between the different phases of service are not sharply drawn.
This figure helps us to organize across the following chapters what we know about managing a
service delivery system so as to provide an exceptional experience. In reality, the distinctions between
the phases of producing services like hospitality experiences are not clear. A refrigerator is built in a
distant factory, delivered to a store, and then purchased in that store. Each stage of the production and
delivery system is clearly distinct. The borders between the phases of service delivery represent
overlapping areas and are not distinct.

As noted, planning for the service experience begins even before the guest walks through the
door, and part of this planning involves preparing for the inevitable customer waits, represented by the
upper gray area in Figure. The customer perceives the wait as part of the service experience, and if it
is mishandled or too long, then the guest may feel that, overall, the entire service experience was
disappointing. Another blurred line, represented by the lower gray area in Figure, represents service
recovery or the correction of errors. They can be corrected either during the service or after the
service. Obviously, the best time to catch, fix, apologize, and possibly compensate for failures is
before the guest actually leaves.

Although organizations are not happy about guest complaints, all should welcome them as
valuable feedback on how well they are meeting their guests’ needs and expectations. Complaining
guests give a clear indication that their service experience was in some way not a
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success. Because research shows that most dissatisfied guests do not complain, organizations need
methods for measuring the success of all service experiences, not just experiences that guests
complain about. Only in that way can organizations ensure that they are delivering the expected
service, to every guest, every time.

Because organizations need systematic ways to learn how well they are doing in order to get
better, they survey not only the guests that came in but also the ones in their target market who didn’t,
or those who didn’t come back.

The Phases of Service Delivery

The Self-Healing System

As noted by Horst Schulze, even if you have all the characteristics and features of a high-quality hotel,
its service delivery system can still fail from time to time. Schulze’s goal was to use the people and
the system designers to create what he termed a self-healing system, in which the employees can
override the system and fix guest problems when it fails. The employees in a self- healing system are
also responsible for telling management where the system has failed so that together they can fix it.
Just as everyone is responsible for providing and maintaining quality, everyone is responsible for
avoiding and fixing service failures.

The Cycle Goes On

The cycle of planning, monitoring, and assessing/improving should never stop. The service plan lays
out what you think your service delivery system should do for the guest, the control measures tell you
if what you planned is in fact happening, and the commitment to improvement focuses everyone’s
attention on analyzing the data collected to fix any identified problems and move toward a flawless
guest experience. The measures used should also trigger recognition of
<exceptions,= variations from the plan.

In addition to including ways to measure how well the service is being rendered at every step of
the delivery process, a good plan must also include ways to measure how the overall plan
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is succeeding. When guests are asked about their experience, most of them evaluate it holistically.
They are often unable to identify how any one part of the experience influenced their determination of
the total experience’s value and their degree of satisfaction. They can, however, give an overall
impression of service quality that can trigger managerial investigations. The guest may be unhappy
with the dining experience at the restaurant, but until management sits down and carefully analyzes
the data measuring each step in the entire guest experience, it may not recognize whether the
dissatisfaction was caused by a long wait, a dirty bathroom, a cold appetizer, a rude server, or a messy
entrance littered with cigarette butts. Knowing what the delivery system is supposed to do and
analyzing data collected from the measures should trigger the necessary corrective actions.

PLANNING TECHNIQUES

The first step in service delivery system design is planning out the steps and processes in the entire
system. Planning techniques focus on constructing or diagramming a thoroughly detailed step-by-
step description of what the service delivery process involves and the service standards that must be
met. Planning always starts with the guest and frequently begins with the moment when the guest
becomes aware of the organization’s ability to satisfy some need. The guest’s expectations begin to
build from that moment, long before the guest ever arrives at your front door. Since we know that
what the guest expects forms the basis or criterion for determining how well the experience satisfies
the guest, understanding those expectations becomes the first step in planning for and then providing
any guest experience. This understanding forms the basis for the beginning of delivery system
planning.

Detailing the delivery system by diagramming it has several immediate benefits to managers
seeking to fail-safe the delivery of their service. First, by writing it down, they can see on paper or on
a computer screen, in a flowchart form that is easy to understand and study, how all parts of the
system work. Second, the process of creating a diagram allows managers a visual means to show the
service delivery process to others and how the various parts of the organization must work together.
Third, having a visual representation of the service delivery system allows for thoughtful
consideration of what processes guests should see and what should occur out of their line of vision.
Fourth, it provides a means for comparing ideal service, as embodied in the diagram, with actual
service, to identify aspects of the process that need improvement. Fifth, and perhaps most importantly,
by focusing attention on component elements of the service delivery process, diagramming illustrates
areas where problems are occurring and which areas need improvement.

Of the many planning techniques available, four basic ones are commonly used to develop a
detailed plan for delivering the guest experience. The tools are blueprinting, the universal service map,
fishbone analysis, PERT/CPM, and simulation. Each has its own advantages, but all are premised on
the idea that a detailed written plan leads to a better system for managing the people, organization, and
production processes that deliver the total guest experience. These tools are especially useful because
they can readily incorporate the measurements necessary for control and analysis of problems that
may appear in the system. After the plan is devised, managers can also use these techniques to focus
on any part that guest feedback indicates might be a problem area. If effort and care are devoted to the
plan, failures should be minimized. This is important because if situations are regularly permitted to
get to the point where problem-solving and failure recovery techniques become necessary, some
guests will inevitably be lost to competitors.
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Blueprinting
The most commonly discussed type of service diagramming is blueprinting. The entire service
delivery process and its subprocesses are described in blueprint format as if one were building a house
and needed a plan of what went where. In effect, a good blueprint defines every component part and
activity, not just of the delivery system, but of the entire guest experience from the moment when the
guest sees the front door or greeting sign to the time that the guest departs and moves out of sight.

A typical blueprint has five parts:

1. Physical evidence. The tangible physical parts of the service experience that can impact
customer assessment of quality and value.
2. Customer actions. The actions and behaviors of customers, which drive the creation of a
blueprint.
3. Onstage/visible contact-employee actions. Things that customer-contact employees do as
part of the face-to-face encounter and which customers see.
4. Backstage/nonvisible contact-employee actions. Things that customer-contact
employees do out of sight of customers but which must happen for the experience to take place;
this part of the blueprint also includes nonvisible interaction with customers (e.g., a customer’s
telephone call to make a reservation).
5. Support processes. Activities essential to providing the service but carried out by individuals
and units that do not have direct contact with the customer (e.g., maintaining the company’s
information systems, food delivery, managing payroll).

Every event that is scheduled to happen from the start to the finish of the experience is laid
out on a blueprint, as is every contingency that can reasonably be projected. Those points at which
service failures are most likely to occur should be identified and early warning mechanisms included

The blueprint should attach times to the activities and processes involved in providing the
service and the time for the entire guest experience. If an excellent service product in a compatible
environment is provided in twenty minutes, a guest may feel rushed; if the service is provided within
an hour, satisfied; if the service takes two hours to deliver, the guest may never return.

Finally, the purpose of blueprinting is not only to satisfy the guest but also to enable the
organization to achieve its profit goal. Providing the service according to a well-designed blueprint
will permit the organization to show a profit while maximizing the quality and value of guest
experiences.

Adding Detail to Blueprints

Extending the simple example by incorporating all the fine points of hot dog vending would make for
a more complicated but more complete process diagram. The blueprint could go into even greater
detail by breaking down each step into even more specific subroutines (e.g., how long each hot dog
should cook, ounces of condiments and their order of application). The blueprint for the hot dog stand
would become even more complex if complementary products were added, such as sandwiches,
sodas, or ice cream desserts.

Of course, more detail isn’t always better. The level of detail should be sufficient to help
improve decision making and service quality but should not go so far as to produce a document too
extensive and overwhelming to be of any use.
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Even for a business that provides a

simple service product like a hot dog
stand, a service blueprint can identify
how long service should take, potential
fail points, and the complexity that can
exist in the service delivery system.
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The Universal Service Map
A universal service map, a variant (and, typically, more elaborate version) of a blueprint that can
be generally applied to a variety of service situations. It begins, appropriately, with the guest making a
reservation.

This arrangement is more than symbolic; it shows that the satisfied customer is the ultimate
outcome of the process. All the boxes and the lines connecting them merely represent how the
organization gets from the initial determination of management strategy to the final outcome of
customer satisfaction

The Line of Internal Interactions

In the universal service map, three horizontal dotted lines divide groups of boxes. The bottom line is
the line of internal interactions, representing all the things that must happen inside the organization to
produce the service experience. In this group of boxes are the organizational back- of-the-house
functions that supply and support the frontline service employee with the product part of the service
experience. These would include the reservation system of a hotel, the kitchen for a restaurant, and the
underground trash-removal system at the Magic Kingdom. The customer doesn’t usually see these
activities being performed, but their impact on the service experience is nonetheless considerable.
Moving trash in the Disney theme parks is a good illustration. Since dirt, trash, and clutter interfere
with the fantasy, Disney has designed a way to remove it without customers noticing. All trash
produced in the Magic Kingdom is dumped into vacuum stations located strategically throughout the
park. The trash is whisked away beyond sight of the customers.

The Line of Visibility

Next is the line of visibility. This line separates activities that are visible to the customer from those
the customer cannot see. The service employee disappears beyond this line from the view of the
customer to interact with the back-of-the-house operations. After the server at a restaurant takes an
order from the guest, she disappears from view to deliver it to the line cook in the kitchen. Although
this part of the service delivery process occurs out of sight of the customer, recognizing this
interaction between server and cook as a category of activities is important because service failures at
this point are frequent. Problems arise when the server does not take the time to write down the entire
order and assumes that the cook will know what to do, or when the convention manager forgets to tell
the food and beverage department all the details about the time and length of the convention food
break. In effect, the backof-the-house people must think of the servers as their guests or customers,
and vice versa, and do the best they can to serve their needs just as the front-of-the-house people serve
the guests. In these interactions between servers and support staff lie many opportunities for
communication problems and system breakdowns. They require as much managerial time and
attention as the encounters between the guests and the front-of- the-house servers.

The Line of Guest Interaction

The uppermost dotted line is the line of guest or customer interaction. It separates those things the
customer does in the service experience from those that the service employee does. These are the
points of interaction between the provider and the customer at which the customer becomes, in effect,
a co-producer of the service experience. It is the point where passengers respond to the flight
attendant’s instruction to look around and pick up all their personal belongings before leaving the
plane, or where the customer drives forward to pick up the food order at the McDonald’s drive-
through window. The activities above this line are also the point where customers decide about the
value of the experience, which in turn decides whether or not they will return. By noting the activities
above the line of guest interaction, the service manager can
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identify the critical events4 the moments of truth4that influence this all-important decision process by
the customer. By focusing on these actions (making the reservation, arriving at the hotel, checking in,
checking out, etc.), the manager can do whatever is possible to influence the customers’ experiences
so that they decide to return

This Universal Service Map, Essentially a Blueprint of the Entire Service Delivery
System,
Provides a Detailed Analysis of a Customer’s Overnight Stay at a Hotel

Fishbone Analysis
While planning the delivery system, if a widespread and possibly system-wide service delivery
problem is foreseen, as opposed to a more localized service failure, one technique that may be used is
a cause-and-effect analysis, in the form of a fishbone diagram. It provides a way to concentrate on
the problem areas to avoid or recover from faulty service outcomes. The results of fishbone analysis
are often used to make major changes in the delivery system.

Late Departures at Quickconnect Airlines

The figure shows an application of fishbone analysis to a problem at a hypothetical regional connector
airline, Quickconnect Airlines: too many planes departing late. That problem becomes the spine of the
fish in the diagram. The general areas within which problems that could delay flights might arise are
attached as bones to the spine. For example, <equipment= is required to get the planes off the ground
on time and so becomes a potential source of delay. All the possible contributors to an equipment
failure then become bones attached to the equipment bone, and so on with each resource and potential
problems with it. The potential contributors to failure are typically identified through group discussion
with the employees involved; they should know the reasons for late departures. Quickconnect’s
employees should be able to readily identify the possible trouble spots.
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PERT/CPM

PERT/CPM Defined
The PERT/CPM planning technique, frequently used in the construction industry and the military,
has many points of application in the hospitality industry as well. PERT stands for Program
Evaluation Review Technique and CPM for Critical Path Method. Because these two techniques are
similar, they have been merged into a single planning strategy and device referred to as PERT/CPM.
PERT/CPM offers the benefits of any good planning tool. It provides to the manager a detailed, well-
organized plan combined with a control measurement process for analyzing how well the plan is being
executed. PERT/CPM is useful in planning major projects such as hosting a convention, building a
convention center, or opening a new hotel. PERT/CPM can also be used to plan a wide variety of
smaller repetitive projects that have a beginning, an end, and a whole lot of things that must happen in
between

The steps in the PERT/CPM process are (1) identifying the activities that must be done
to complete the project, (2) determining the sequence of activities, (3) estimating how long each
activity will take, (4) creating and diagramming the network of activities, and (5) finding the critical
path, which highlights the sequence of activities where no slack time is available and everything has
to happen as planned or else the project will be delayed. The successful use of the process may depend
on the accuracy of the estimates made in Step (3), and they are not always easy to make.
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The Diagrams
Using a PERT/CPM diagram like that seen in Figure 10-5 allows the service manager to achieve
several important objectives. First, the manager gains all the usual advantages of planning.
Unforeseen events and activities can be identified. How long something will take to do is readily
estimated. Everyone involved in the project has an easily understood picture, in the form of the
PERT/CPM chart, that shows all the pieces of the project, the sequence in which they are laid out and
must be accomplished, time estimates for finishing each project step, and the total time for completing
the entire project. Finally, the PERT/ CPM chart shows the items that must be done on time to get the
project accomplished as scheduled, which activities can be done at the same time as other activities,
and which must happen before others. PERT/CPM can be used to plan any activity that takes time,
and it would be hard to find any service experience that doesn’t take time.

Circles and Arrows

PERT/CPM diagrams are simple to create. They consist of circles or bubbles, representing completed
events, and arrows representing the activities that must be done before an event can be considered
completed. The arrows connect the circles, and the arrow points to the event for completion of which
the activity is necessary. In the figure, Event 1 must be completed before work can be begun on
activities leading to completed Event 2, and the same is true of Event 3. Only after completing Event
3 can work begin on Events 4, 5, and 6, which can be worked on independently of each other. Event
13 has three arrows pointing toward it, signifying that completion of Event 13 will first require
completing Events 9, 10, and 12, and then completing the activities following them and leading up to
Event 13. As the chart shows, Events 9, 10, and 12 themselves require that prior activities and events
must be completed before their own completion. The critical path indicated in the chart will be
explained in more detail below, but, briefly, it is the sequence of events that must occur on time if the
project is to be completed on time. It has no <slack= time (i.e., any time difference between when an
event is scheduled for completion and when it must be completed for the entire project to end on time)
in it as the other two paths do.

A Simple PERT/CPM Chart

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Building the Network

Five steps are required to build a PERT/CPM network.

Step 1: Activity-event analysis. The manager defines all events that must occur for the project to
be completed, and all activities leading up to those events. The real fruits of the planning process
occur at this step. By taking the time and making the effort, the manager can detail every activity in
the project and uncover every step that must be taken.

Step 2: Activity-event sequencing. Once the manager has defined the activities and events that
must at some time occur, they can be placed in their proper sequence. Developing the sequence may
reveal previously undiscovered or unknown events that must be scheduled. If you are describing how
to tie a shoelace, you may forget event number one4that you must first have a shoelace4unless you
sequence the process step by step.

Step 3: Activity time estimates. The next step is for the manager to estimate how much time each
activity will take so that an expected time for completing each event and the entire project can be
calculated. The manager can use a simple and often-used formula to arrive at a weighted- average
time estimate for each activity:

Expected time ¼ (optimistic time þ 4 times most likely time þ pessimistic time) divided by 6

Step 4: Diagramming the project. After all the events are sequenced, the activities detailed, and
time estimates for each activity made, the pieces can be put together into the total-project diagram.

Step 5: Identifying the critical path. By summing up the activity times across the paths leading
to the project completion, the manager can estimate the total time for completing the project and can
identify the critical path, the CP of PERT/CPM, the sequence of activities that leaves no slack time. If
these events don’t happen on time, the project won’t be finished as scheduled. Other paths in the
network may have a time difference between when the events must happen and when they are
scheduled to happen based on the calculation of activity times.

TARGETING SPECIFIC PROBLEM AREAS IN SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEMS

Much of the planning process we have discussed in this chapter is designed to make something
good happen: a wow service experience. Such planning deals with the entire service system and
how the functional components work together to deliver the guest experience that customers want and
expect. This planning is indeed critical to deliver an exceptional service experience by integrating all
elements of the process. An equally important part of planning is to keep something bad from
happening: problems and service failures. Such techniques as fishbone analysis and PERT/CPM
charts can identify actual or potential problem areas in the system.

Forecasting Demand to Prevent Problems

A major function of planning is to prevent problems. One strategy is forecasting and managing
demand. For example, if an analysis of the service delivery system indicates a potential service
problem caused by excessive waits, a statistical analysis that forecasts demand might be an effective
tool for discovering how much of a problem the waits might be and what can be done to address them
before the doors open for the first customer. If a statistical prediction of the customer demand for a
theme park on a particular day indicates that the park will be full, a preventive
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strategy will lead to the park’s management calling in full staff, preparing extra food supplies, and
having available the full capacity of each attraction. Restaurants may require reservations when the
projected demand is high. Having a reservation system means that customer demand can be better
matched with restaurant capacity and guests will not be disappointed with waiting when they come to
the restaurant. In addition, the restaurant can know the number of diners to expect so that it can staff
appropriately and have sufficient amounts of prepared items to ensure that the dining experience is
enjoyable and trouble free. If the restaurant fails to plan, and customers are disappointed with a long
wait, slow service, or out-of-stock menu items, their perception of the quality of the overall service
experience will be poor, and a service failure will result. It is not uncommon to see Internet posts like
<Good dinner, fair price, but I had to wait too long. I don’t think it’s worth the wait and don’t see
what all the hype’s about. I’d suggest you go somewhere else.= Keeping the wait down avoids that
type of failure.

If the demand can be forecasted for a longer period of time, other proactive strategies can be
implemented. If demand for the next quarter or next year, for example, is expected to increase by 20
percent, new capacity can be built, new employees hired and trained, and merchandise inventories
increased to ensure that customers are not disappointed by long lines, unavailable souvenirs, or
untrained and inadequate staff.

Training
Adequate training of employees before they ever get the chance to serve a customer can prevent
failures. The people who deliver any service need to know exactly what the total experience should
consist of and need to be motivated to ensure that the guest experience happens in the way it is
supposed to, every time, for every guest. Just as hospitals run disaster drills in conjunction with fire
departments and rescue teams to prepare for unexpected, randomly occurring disasters, so can
hospitality staff be trained, through practice, to handle both the expected and the unexpected.

Quality Teams
The use of quality teams is another preventive strategy. Recall how the Ritz-Carlton employees solved
their service delivery system problem of late room-service breakfasts and how quality teams at the
Quickconnect Airlines used a fishbone analysis to solve departure delays. Both show the value of
letting the people directly involved in the service experience get together to identify service delivery
system problems and recommend solutions to prevent their recurrence. Quite often, no one is in a
better position to foresee and prevent problems than the people who have already experienced a wide
range of problems and seen first-hand guest frustration with those problems.

Poka-Yokes
Trying to fix a problem once a customer has experienced it may be too late, so any devices or
processes that can fail-safe the service delivery system or any part of it against human error are
extremely desirable. Conceived by the late Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese quality improvement expert,
poka-yoke (POH-kah YOH-kay)4the name Shingo gave these failure-preventing devices or
procedures4means <mistake proofing= or <avoid mistakes= in Japanese. A poka-yoke basically
involves inspection of the system for possible failure points and then finding or developing simple
means to prevent, or immediately detect and correct, mistakes at those points. A poka-yoke is a
proactive or preventive strategy for avoiding mistakes. Although it originated in the manufacturing
sector, it can be used in planning and monitoring the service experience to keep it operating as
flawlessly as possible
 Quality Service Management in Tourism
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MODUL Here are some simple poka-yoke examples. Automobiles have many poka-yokes. To ensure
that cars don’t start moving when the ignition is turned on, the car is designed to not start unless the
driver has a foot on the brake. Likewise, there are devices that prevent you from shifting a car into
reverse when it is moving forward and devices that keep intoxicated drivers from starting their cars.
Everywhere you look you can see examples. To ensure equity of service order and avoid
disagreements, organizations ask customers to <take a number= or make a reservation. A surgeon’s
tray and a mechanic’s wrench-set box may have a unique indentation for each item to ensure that no
instrument is left inside a patient following surgery or wrench in an engine. Restaurants now buy
different colored knives and cutting boards to prevent cross-contamination of food: Blue for fish,
yellow for fowl, green for vegetables, and red for meat make it immediately apparent to all what
should be on the cutting board and which knife should be used to cut it

Types of Inspections
Shingo identified three types of inspections. In the services industry, they would be source
inspections, in which potential mistakes are located at their source and fixed before they can get
into the delivery system, self-inspections, in which people check their own work, and successive
inspections, in which the person next in the service delivery system checks the quality and accuracy
of the previous person’s work. Mistakes can occur and poka-yokes can be used in all these inspection
types.

An example of a source inspection is the chef monitoring the preprepared foods4such as

salads, boned chicken, or whatever must be assembled in advance of the rush hour4to ensure that
sufficient quantities of the items are available. An example of a self-inspection is the line cook
personally comparing the order he has prepared against a picture of what the food display should look
like before putting it on the service counter. An example of a successive inspection is the food server
in a restaurant checking the food order on the counter before taking it out of the kitchen. Obviously,
the closer to the source that errors or potential errors can be detected, the better.

Cross-Functional Project and Matrix Organizations

Sometimes, the problems in delivering a service experience can be traced back to the design or
structure of the organization itself. A functionally organized hotel, for example, may not consistently
provide the service experience defined by its mission if its individual departments focus on their own
individual goals and objectives rather than on guest satisfaction across the entire experience. A guest
doesn’t care about the room’s division manager’s goals and challenges or the food and beverage
manager’s problems and concerns. Guests care about the quality and value of the entire experience
they are paying for, and the individual organizational components need to be effectively connected in
ways that unite them to focus everyone on ensuring guest satisfaction.

One method of organizing people and groups to enable them to focus on the guest’s needs,
wants, and expectations across the boundaries of functional organizational units is by creating a
temporary cross-functional structure. This term is also used to refer to a matrix structure where a
group or project team is overlaid on the traditional functional organizational structure to work on a
specific task or serve a particular customer for a limited time. Traditional organizational structures are
characterized by a single line of authority running from top to bottom: You report to one person; that
person reports to somebody else. This also tends to mean information flows in one direction: from the
top down. A cross-functional organization is characterized by multiple lines of authority. You may
report to more than one person; that person may do the same.
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Advantages and Disadvantages of Cross-Functional Project and Matrix Structures
To ensure maintaining the same focus on guest satisfaction as the Ritz-Carlton, other hospitality
organizations use project teams, matrix structures, and other cross-functional structures. Because these
structures generally involve people working under more than one line of authority, some traditional
managers who believe that strict lines of authority are important have problems working with cross-
functional structures. On the other hand, crossing functional areas and getting everyone focused on the
guest can offer some important benefits.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cross-Functional Project and Matrix Structures

ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
1. Makes the guest, not the function, the 1. Violates traditional <single line of
2. focus. If one person or team is responsible for authority.= Most companies are still organized to
satisfying guest needs, the focus of the have a single and clear chain of command.
organization is placed directly on the overall Implementing a cross-functional structure changes
service needs of the guest, rather than the specific this traditional form of management.
element of the experience delivered by any one 2. Ambiguity about control. Because different
functional department. functional areas are involved, it can be unclear
3. Improved lateral exchange of information. who is ultimately in charge or responsible for
If multiple functional areas work together, certain decisions, either for technical issues or
different providers of services will communicate human resource management issues.
more with each other. 3. Creates organizational conflict between
4. Improved vertical exchange of information. functional and project managers. Even when
The interactive process needed for cross- units work together for certain projects, there are
functional teams means that information will flow still functional activities that must be completed.
to, from, and through an organization’s hierarchy Having cross-functional groups can create a
more quickly. Cross-functional structures also lead conflict between managers of cross- functional
to flatter (less hierarchical) organizations, with teams and managers of functional areas, because
fewer levels through which information must pass. they may have different, even conflicting, goals.
5. Increased flexibility in use of human 4. Creates interpersonal conflict. Cross-
capital. When different functional areas work functional structures require that individuals with
together, it becomes easier to determine where different backgrounds, perspectives on work, time
there may be too many people, and where there are horizons, and goals work together. Such
not enough employees. A cross functional differences can lead to greater interpersonal
structure facilitates the ability of people to work in conflict.
different areas. 5. Creates insecurity and loss of status. With
6. Increased individual motivation and a different organizational structure, some managers
attitudes. Through a cross-functional structure, will lose some authority as more responsibility is
individuals have a better sense of the entire service given to cross-functional groups and project
product being delivered. When employees see the managers. This can reduce the perceived status of
entire product, as opposed to just a piece of it, they functional managerial roles and make some
tend to be more motivated to perform better and managers insecure with their reduced authority.
have higher job satisfaction, organizational 6. More costly for organization. Cross-
commitment, and morale. functional structures can lead to increased
overhead and staff, more meetings, delayed
decisions, and more information processing. All
this can add to organizational costs.
7. More difficult for individuals. Individuals
working in cross-functional structures will face
greater role ambiguity. Potentially conflicting
instructions or orders may lead to personal stress.
 Quality Service Management in Tourism
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Kindly check the video link below for making fish bone diagram.

VIDEO GUIDE:
Please check the video guide below of 8Fishbone Diagram
Explained with Example9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbRx5pw−efg

Kindly check the video link below on how to make a PERT/CPM chart.

VIDEO GUIDE:
Please check the video guide below of 8EASY−HOW−TO
PERT/CPM (Activity Network Diagram) Tutorial (Manual)9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy−x9KGMAlY

Answer the following questions briefly.

1. Why is it important to check the delivery system first before checking to see whether employees
are to blame for service failures?
2. If you opened a new restaurant, would you bother to blueprint your service delivery system? Why
or why not?
3. You have been asked to manage a local music festival.
A. How would a PERT/CPM chart help you do this?
B. What would its essential elements, the individual circles in the chart, be?
C. What would your PERT/CPM chart look like? Sketch it out, indicating the critical path.
4. Describe several situations in which hospitality managers could use cross-functional project and
matrix teams to improve the quality and/or value of the guest experience.
5. Providing a wow service and preventing service problems are two sides of the same coin. Discuss.

REFERENCE/S:
ONLINE PDF SOURCE:
BOOK SOURCE: Managing Quality Service in Hospitality (How Organizations Achieve
in the Guest Experience) – Robert C. Ford; Michael C. Sturman; Cherill P. Hearson
ONLINE SOURCES: