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Salty Coffee

31 March, 2011 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I worked for a coffee shop. It was great, we only had one problem; occasionally there was a bit of a mix up at the serving hatch. The salt and sugar were in similar containers. Sometimes we put a pinch or two of salt in our customer’s coffee, not very often, and then just a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capability, continuous improvement, customer focus, poor service, service improvement

Fresh as the Moment when the Pod went Pop

22 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

All companies obsess about something, their USP, their IP, the thing that they can do that nobody else can. I used to work for Birdseye, the frozen pea people. They used to obsess about getting the peas out of the field and frozen within 2 1/2 hours. They had a panel of pea tasters who […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: assumptions, continuous improvement, innovation, marketing, revenue generation, video

Tickets Please

13 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I use the train a lot, and I buy a lot of tickets.  The guys on East Midlands Mainline are very determined that I pay for all this travel. 1.  They have ticket checking barriers at all entrances to the platforms to make sure I have a ticket. 2.  They have train “managers” on the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: bureaucracy, complexity, East Midlands Trains, poor service, revenue generation, service design

The Monument Part 2

5 November, 2010 by James Lawther 4 Comments

I wrote about monuments. Perhaps a 500 seat call centre is a monument. We have them to optimise efficiency (occupancy and productivity), they are hugely expensive to own and because of their scale they become inflexible. It isn’t easy to change agent training or the front end telephony for a 500 seat call centre. Does […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: call centre, efficiency versus effectiveness, service improvement, silo management

The Monument

3 November, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

In the manufacturing world they use the term “monument” to refer to any piece of equipment that is too big for its purpose. They are expensive pieces of capital equipment that drive massive economies of scale at a local level but fundamentally mess up the total system. Because of their inflexibility they must be “fed” […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capital investment, graphical user interface, information technology, interactive voice response, service design, service improvement

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