Service Revamp

This morning held a much awaited sales-service meet.  I would say much awaited as I've been expecting a major restructuring of service for a while now.  Our company has met much difficulties the past couple of years, ballooning in expenses and manpower, as well as service requests and back orders.  We've gone through several persons each doing his or her best to take on the daunting role of the service manager.  There were high expectations to be met.  Some have gone their separate ways.  Some have shifted to roles a bit less challenging.  And then some have persevered through thick and thin, goals met or unmet.  We've added people with different levels of training.  But after the past year, we still aren't there.  We're in much need of foundational and procedural improvements.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to join in much of the meeting.  Actually, I might have missed the session completely if not for perky ears on an early curious morning.  I did my best to attend, even if I felt somewhat uninvited, although I skipped the delicious breakfast of tuyo and salted eggs -- dietary compulsions. Alas, with other important things to attend, it seems I only got to the intro and finale.  It might have been exponentially interesting to get to the gist of the meeting.

What can we expect?  From what I see, there will be papers and more, and trees crying.  Service order forms,  return forms, differentiation of repair and delivery/installations -- seems standard fare in traditional companies.  They will do much good in making our service operations measurable -- as long as they're properly implemented.  Splitting the service group to Repairs and Delivery/Installation can help in response times and specializations.  Ultimately it will be about customer satisfaction.  Expect things to become much much better.

~~~

As a side note, it seems I can't say much given how out of the loop I sometimes feel now about various company processes.  As I'm more of an IT and Supply Chain personnel, I'm still trying to see how the changes will fit in the overall scheme.  On one end, it's disheartening not to have input about the changes being implemented.  I've already wrote a service module in our in-house enterprise system, though it needed more love and attention, and actual use and tuning.  (I'm all for evolutionary programming, although right now I'm by myself.)  On the other end, I'm still excited to work on redesigning the service management module.  The past month, I've been contemplating on getting more hands-on service management experience.  There are naysayers on implementing it through computers, valid reasons all -- personnel "computational complexity", keeping things simple, etc.  But I don't really see the conflict.  It's a design problem.  That's the exciting part.