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Modeling Service Delivery Management with MapSys
Companies in a wide range of industries rely on the quality of their service to attract and retain their customers. Maintaining a balance between the growth in customer base and service capacity is a significant challenge specially when the incoming service request is of a random and unpredictable nature.
When the demand for service increases most companies respond by making their employees work harder and put in longer hours. If this behavior continues, it leads to quality problems, productivity losses and fatigue. Sustained fatigue will increase the attrition rate and exacerbate the quality problems.
A MapSys model of the service delivery process allows the managers to understand the relationship among service capacity, service delivery and customer satisfaction. A simple representative model of a service delivery system is shown below:
As customer requests for service arrive, they accumulate in a backlog of service requests and will remain there until they are fulfilled. The level of Backlog and the Desired Delivery Delay as well as Desired Time per Order determine the Desired Service Capacity. If the actual Service Capacity is less than its desired value, it leads to Work Pressure which in most instances results in higher work intensity. There are other parts to this simple model that create mechanisms for representing the fatigue and employee attrition due to a sustained level of work pressure.
This model is fully described in a paper by Rogelip Oliva and John Sterman (management Science, Vol. 47, No. 7, July 2001, pp. 894-914).
MapSys can be used to build a complex model of service delivery that can aid the decision makers in designing effective policies to maintain a near optimum level of capacity to manage the delivery of a quality service to the customers.
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