Enhancing performance in service organisations: a case study based on value stream analysis in the telecommunications industry

Performance-enhancing efforts in the manufacturing industry have centred on ‘lean’ principles and philosophies since the early 1970s. Lean principles, philosophies, tools and methods have also been significantly deployed to enhance performance in service processes within the manufacturing industry, as well as the process industry (e.g. inspection, maintenance and modification-related). It has been observed that when the main business is mostly centred on service-providing processes, significantly less effort is put into exploiting the use of lean approaches to enhance performance. Therefore, it is vital to investigate the potential of ‘lean’ concepts’ implementation in a service-providing organisation. This manuscript is based on the value stream mapping and the value stream analysis (VSA) performed in a Polish telecommunication-industry-related service-providing company. A plain old telephone services-based case study is presented. The service-providing process is analysed in order to identify the current existing drawbacks and to propose improvements to enhance performance. Based on the current state value stream map and the VSA results, a future state value stream map was developed. Then, process efficiency was calculated in order to assess the level of performance improvement.