The impact of service design and process management on clinical quality: An exploration of synergetic effects

While service design and process management have received research attention in the past, there is limited empirical work examining both factors in the hospital setting. Through operationalizing focus as a service design approach and quality improvement (QI) initiatives as process management efforts, we hypothesize that focus and QI initiatives affect clinical quality both individually and collectively. Utilizing heart attack procedures as the study context, we examine a set of hypotheses based on a panel dataset consisted of 201 hospitals from 2005 to 2011 in the state of Florida. After accounting for potential lag effects and endogeneity biases, we find empirical support to the proposed hypotheses.     

Perspectives on line managers in human resource management: Hilton International's UK hotels

Although contextual factors act to encourage the devolvement of human resource management to line managers, recent research indicates that there is substantial potential for human resource specialists and line managers to share more effectively responsibility for their organization's human resource activities in business partnerships. The foundation for this is arguably commonality in opinions on the principles and practices of human resource activities. However, line managers and human resource specialists often have dissonant opinions on human resource management.

This paper explores line manager and human resource specialists' perspectives on line manager involvement in human resource management, theoretically and empirically. The primary work comprises a survey of the views of line managers and human resource specialists on devolving a range of human resource activities to line managers in a case organization, Hilton International's UK hotels. Differences between line managers' and human resource specialists' perspectives are found in five aspects: understanding and ownership of the company's service and HR strategy; line manager involvement in and rankings of HR activities; HR specialists' support of line managers; barriers to line managers' involvement in HR activities; and the competence of line managers in HR activities. Importantly, it is found that where there are divergent views across line managers and their HR specialist in their hotel there is poor hotel business performance and, conversely, convergent views are evident in the effectively performing hotels. These findings may have resonance for other organizations in devolving human resource management to the line and developing human resource business partnerships for business performance. It is proposed that three types of line manager buy-in are central to their active involvement in HR, namely: conceptual understanding of the rationale for their involvement; implementation effectiveness through HR role clarity and capability; and affective commitment in believing in the value of their involvement in HR.     

地方政府公共服务全面质量管理探讨

随着全球化和信息化的变革,经济的发展和社会的进步,公众受教育水平、政治参与意识不断提高,对政府的期望值和服务要求也在提高,这种情况下,传统的政府管理已不能适应要求,而将全面质量管理引入到政府公共服务中来,就成为构建服务型政府的一种必要途径。     

浅谈手机研发过程的质量管理

如今Iphone6 plus已成为引领手机时尚的主流,越来越多的人热衷此款手机。在苹果公司对占领全球手机市场的营运背景下,过于重视对手机快速的更新和产量的激增,而忽略了客户对手机质量的高要求。经过客户使用一段时间,投诉手机质量的问题在迅速攀升。在高端手机不断研发的同时,更应注重研发过程中的质量管理。前期开发决定最后的成功,前期的质量管理更是顾客所见到的。只有这样才是真正对顾客负责,才能赢得顾客的信赖和发挥品牌效应。但如今苹果手机事业部的高层管理者更加关注的是研发周期、研发速度、研发价格与利润,对产品本身的质量和可靠性则关心不够。因此,在此背景下,文章分析了手机研发过程中的质量管理,希望研发工作者和高层管理者能更加重视研发过程中的质量。同时,也希望能给读者一点建议和思考。     

Business process reengineering: a pathway for performance improvement

Health care materiel management executives are coping with a revolutionary environment. Demands and constraints are being placed on hospitals that necessitate both long-term solutions and rapid responses. Materiel management executives can play a vital role in transforming their areas from a passive service center to an active command center. It is essential that the materiel management executive play an active role in the change process.     

Managing Cultural Diversity in Collaborations: A focus on management tensions

Abstract

This article explores the management of cultural diversity in public and not-for-profit collaborations spanning organizational, professional and national boundaries. Through the framing of a culture paradox, it identifies three interrelated tensions pertaining to the management of cultural diversity towards collaborative advantage. These tensions address: interactions between organizations within a collaboration; interactions between individual actors and their orientation towards the collaboration and their host organization; and the quantity and extent of cultural diversity within a collaboration. The culture paradox and its inherent management tensions provide theoretical and practical conceptualizations that are relevant to management and governance of collaboration.     

Relating focus to quality and cost in a healthcare setting

Focus in healthcare has been heralded as the next frontier in improving its efficiency and efficacy (Herzlinger 2004). Focus takes several different forms, ranging from standalone specialty centers to a hospital that places a strategic emphasis on a clinical area. We adopt this latter perspective and define focus as a disproportionate emphasis on a particular clinical area in a hospital. We use secondary data from hospitals providing cardiology care in New York State to examine the relationship between focus and performance. We develop two measures of focus. Proportional focus is defined to be the proportion of cases treated in a particular clinical specialty. Expertise focus is defined to be specific evidence that a hospital has taken action to build expertise in treating diseases in that specialty. We operationalize hospital performance along cost and quality dimensions, and we use hierarchical regression to examine the impact of focus on performance. Our results indicate that proportional focus, but not expertise focus, is associated with better cost performance. Quality performance, on the other hand, was associated only with the interaction between proportional focus and expertise focus, which means that only hospitals exhibiting higher levels of both proportional and expertise focus achieve better quality performance. These findings support the notion that not only is focus important in healthcare, but also that researchers and practitioners need to recognize that relationships are contingent on the performance and focus measures used and thus, findings may not be generalizable from one metric to another.     

Hospital service quality evaluation with IVIF-PROMETHEE and a case study

Measuring satisfaction of patients and understanding their perceptions are important for the hospital management to respond to customers' growing demands for acceptable quality of healthcare services. The main purpose of this paper is to present a methodology that can be used in the healthcare service quality evaluation. IVIF-PROMETHEE method is applied for service quality evaluation based on patients' views in a real-life case study of a public hospital in Istanbul and the results are compared with the results from IVIF-TOPSIS method. Interval Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy (IVIF) set is considered an appropriate tool because of the complexity and vagueness of the evaluation of healthcare services. The evaluation of the quality level of the healthcare service provides detailed information about the effects of considered criteria as well as creates opportunities in implementing effective procedures to overcome service quality problems via analysing the patients' views. The proposed methodology can be a useful tool for hospital management.     

Cycle counting: a quality assurance process.

Accurate inventory records result from careful tracking of in and out transactions. Regardless of how these transactions are done--by computer (backflush) or manually--they must be done correctly if accurate inventory records are to be the result. Cycle counting plays an important role in assuring that there is a sufficient inventory-tracking process in place to achieve accuracy. The purpose of this article is to explain how to use cycle counting to establish an effective process for keeping records accurate and how to ensure that it remains in place.     

Reusing process fragments for fast service composition: a clustering-based approach

With the proliferation of Web services over the Internet and due to the increasing complexity of users’ needs, Web service composition has emerged as a powerful method of software reuse, allowing to deliver complete business processes as a set of interacting services. To guarantee a rapid and secure service composition, fragments of available business processes at different granularities may be considered as a composition unit and recombined to deliver effective compositions. Despite the benefits of this method, most of the existing works do not take into consideration the reuse of service process fragments (SPF). Reusing SPFs allows, not only to minimize the composition time, but also to improve the reliability of the composition process. In this paper, we propose a Web service composition approach that aims to combine service process fragments rather that atomic services. We adopt a powerful mathematical model called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to define the relationships between services and fragments. Moreover, we exploit the regrouping capabilities of FCA by proposing algorithms for the extraction of candidate fragments’ combinations. A scoring function is also defined to determine the quality level of each SPF and its ability to participate in a composition. The experimental studies proved the effectiveness of our FCA-based approach compared to existing state-of-the-art solutions.     

ODM模式下质量管理现状及对策分析

随着全球经济一体化,产业分工日趋细化,电子产业大量发展,因此在电子制造行业,设计生产外包的委托加工生产方式在世界范围内逐步生成的一种普遍现象.而质量管理又是项目管理的重要要素之一.阐述了ODM模式下质量管理的现状与问题,并就如何使用六西格玛(DMAICR)方法进行产品导入过程中质量管理流程的改善进行了深入的介绍和分析.     

The state of total quality management: a review

As quality is seen as becoming a competitive mandate, many organizations are said to be embracing the practice of total quality management (TQM) as an improvement strategy. In this paper, we will be examining the extent to which quality management (QM) - TQM in particular-has been adopted by organizations. Just as there are companies that claim that QM is benefiting them, the concept is also increasingly being criticized for not bringing about the promised results, and in the following review, studies that have highlighted this disparity in opinions will be reviewed. Increasingly, doubts have been raised as to whether partial quality management - and not TQM - is being practised in organizations. This paper will also examine the difficulties companies may be faced with in their attempts to embrace TQM.     

Remuneration practice in a wages council sector: some empirical observations in hotels

The Wages Act 1986 aimed to change the substantive and procedural rules of remuneration practice in order to increase labour market flexibility. Here the findings of a subsequent study on wages and employment conditions are presented and assessed in relation to some of the potential effects of the 1986 legislation     

Doing more with less: smart stockroom management equals great service.

As manufacturers compete for a larger share of a shrinking market, cries for a better way of doing business can be heard resounding throughout the business community. Many companies are now looking toward these principles for help: working smarter, doing more with less, and supplying superior service. One area in which they can be applied successfully is stockroom management. Their implementation can result in positive, cost-effective changes. This article describes how a materiel control organization was able to meet the call for change and in the process increase accuracy, reduce cycle time, and enhance its commitment to providing "great service" to both internal and external customers.