Question

• Recall a bad service experience you recently had. What led to the service failure? Consider such dimensions as tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, or empathy.

• What measures can be taken to provide more capacity at a bottleneck work center?

Answer 1

A bad service experience recently encountered by me was with an airline which was unable to cope up with the challenge of maintaining passenger service amidst bad weather which was charactersied by dense fog, which prevented timely take off and landing of flights at local airport. Although no one can have control on the weather conditions, they were caught off guard this time. The information system, passenger handling at the airport and alternative arrangement of passengers was severly hampered, with tempers rising high from both sides. The service orientation and empathy of the airline officials reaached a new low with staff seen misbehaving with passengers and washing their hands off their responsibility. Their lounge was filled up to the brim, refreshments exhausted and there was no directions on refunds, stay of stranded passengers or at least an information on departures or arrivals. It was a horrible situation that continued for hours, before the weather cleared up. It is true that airlines have no control on weather, but they could have prepared themselves better for such emergencies, based on the previous experiences with weather during this time of year, at least to alleviate the pain and agny of stranded passengers. Airline earned a bad name following this incident.

More capacity can be provided at bottleneck by following.

(i) Allocation of more resources at bottleneck.

(ii) Ensuring ample supply for the bottleneck resources and monitoring that it works at full capacity.

(iii) Ensuring that the best quality items are allocated to bottleneck, so as not to slow it down further.

(iv)Reducing and minimising bottleneck down time.

(v) Revising the production schedule to ensure that bottleneck resource works for higher time.