Transferring best practices between the manufacturing and service sectors (including invited contributions from the 16th EUROMA Conference) – Part 1

Transferring best practices between the manufacturing and service sectors (including invited contributions from the 16th EUROMA Conference) – Part 1

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 21, Issue 3

About the Guest Editors

Michel Leseure Works for the Isle of Man International Business School as a Lecturer in Operations Management. He first graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree from France before studying business in the USA (MBA, Eastern Washington University) and Manufacturing Management in the UK (PhD, University of Sheffield). He has also worked for Loughborough University (UK), Al Akhawayn University (Morocco), Aston Business School (UK) and Plymouth Business School (UK). His research interests are: organisations and technology as naturally evolving systems; effective means of organisational control and performance management; knowledge management in an industrial context; and international operations management. He has worked on EPSRC projects focusing on the building of evolutionary classifications of manufacturing systems and on project knowledge management. He was trained to conduct systematic literature reviews, and as a lead AIM scholar, worked on a review of why British firms find to difficult to successfully implement best practices.

Melanie Hudson-SmithLecturer in Operations Management at the University of Plymouth (UK). Her research interests include quality management and service process improvement; strategically aligned performance measurement and small firm operations improvement. She is currently involved in research projects investigating quality improvement in the financial services sector and customer focused retail supply management. She has published a number of articles in journals including the International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Production Planning and Control and the International Journal of Production Economics.

This special issue of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (Issues 3 and 4 of Volume 21) on the transfer of best practices between the manufacturing and the service sector includes papers which originated from two different streams:

1. 1.

   An initial call for papers which was circulated in the EUROMA, POMS and EFMD mailing lists in September 2008.

2. 2.

   An invitation to expand papers presented at the 16th Euroma Conference which took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in June 2009. The editors are grateful to Patrik Jonsson, the EUROMA Conference organiser from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, for allowing us to approach conference delegates who presented papers which fitted in this special issue.

The majority of papers submitted, or invited, are exploratory case studies of the transfer of best practices from the manufacturing sector to the service sector. The call for papers, though, was much broader, and also invited papers reflecting on the importance and context of such transfers. In particular, the call for papers highlighted the issue of a possible “service, not manufacturing” rhetorical intellectual current in the administration of teaching and research within academic circles. The wealth and diversity of submissions that we have received is witness to the importance of paying attention to lessons learned in the manufacturing sector, and to adapting them to specific service contexts, rather than to risk “reinventing” the wheel.

From an historical perspective, manufacturing technology management in its broadest sense is what created the modern service sector. Jean Fourastié's and Colin Clark's three sectors hypothesis explains how, due to productivity improvements, the workforce previously employed in manufacturing progressively joined the ranks of the service industry and contributed to the growth of this sector. Many of the service operations management innovations of today, which are strongly inspired from those that contributed to the development of manufacturing productivity, are transforming the service sector and it is worth reflecting in which sectors future investments will take place. Some talk of the “information sector or knowledge economy”, some of the “not for profit and government” sector and others of the “experience” economy. As researchers belonging to a broadly defined operations and technology management discipline, we are at the heart of these large-scale societal economic shifts. Thus, a robust assessment of which sectors will grow in the future cannot be made without ignoring lessons of the past, i.e. how manufacturing management created an opportunity for the service revolution, and how we are currently improving service operations management, thereby creating opportunities for new sectors to emerge.

This is why we start the special issue with a selection of papers that inscribe themselves within a theory of operations management fusion where concepts and tools can be used indiscriminately in either domain of application.

In this respect, we differ from the literature that has concentrated on differentiating manufacturing from service operations, and between services operations themselves (e.g. intangibility, perishability, etc.). Such research is important, and inscribes itself within a contingency theory view of operations management, but it should be a complementary stream of research to that of operations management fusion.

Our first paper (an invited contribution from the 16th EUROMA Conference), from Jérôme Chandes and Gilles Paché, illustrates perfectly this approach. Their field of application, humanitarian logistics, is unusual enough that traditional service classifications do not apply. In the case of humanitarian logistics, it is the operations system altogether that is perishable. By adopting a high level conceptualisation of the problem (collective action), the authors are able to identify manufacturing management practices that can be transferred to improve service provision.

Our second paper, from Joel Goldhar and Daniel Berg, proposes a theory of convergence of factory and service processes, and as such, lays the foundation stone for a theory of operations management fusion.

Through a systematic review of the literature, Anu Bask, Mervi Lipponen, Mervi Rajahonka and Markku Tinnilä describe the concept of modularity on the basis of four themes, which can be deployed differently in different contexts. They illustrate what service modularity would mean in the case of logistical service providers. Their paper is also an invited contribution from the 16th EUROMA Conference.

The fourth paper, by Jan Holmström, Timo Ala-Risku, Jaana Auramo, Jari Collin, Eero Eloranta, and Antti Salminen, presents a demand-supply chain representation tool which is used to analyse and discover how to organise activities along service supply chains, which will often include manufacturing operations at some levels.

Finally, the last two papers in this special issue, from Manuel F. Suárez-Barraza and Juan Ramis-Pujol on one hand, and Zoe Radnor on the other hand, document the process of transferring best practices (in this case, lean management) into the government sector.

Together, these papers start to describe, explore and examine the fusion theory of operations management. The second part of the special issue will complement this with detailed application papers, which help to illustrate fusion in practice.

Michel Leseure, Melanie Hudson-SmithGuest Editors