Question: What would you consider are the significant differences between implementing quality systems in services and in manufacturing environments?

Townsend:

Ok, if you start off by just counting up the number Baldrige Awards won by manufacturing concerns and the number won by service organizations, you find that the manufacturing companies far out number service. Then when you add in the idea that there are far more service organizations than there are manufacturing, the gap becomes even wider. So it is obvious that something different is going on, and in a lot of ways it is tougher in service. Now, why? For one thing the measurements that need to be taken to determine quality or to attract levels of quality in service are less obvious. They are often more subtle; they are tougher to assign objective numbers to them. In manufacturing, it is often easier to draw a direct line from the change in manufacturing line to the bottom line. It is a nice straight connection, so it is easier to win backing from everybody at all levels for this change.

In service, you also have, also in manufacturing there is a repetitious side of thing that makes it far easier to spot where changes could be made that would ripple throughout the organization. In service, there’s, in some ways, there’s more room for creativity because they do more small things, and you can try out small things. Where in manufacturing, it is tough to make a small change in the manufacturing production line to try out without changing a lot machinery and going through great expense. In service, you can at least make those small changes. But the thing is that with service, service employees engage customers face to face, eyeball to eyeball, or maybe just ear to mouth – by phone or in person, far more frequently than manufacturing employees do. What that does, it means that mean they are up against a changing set of priorities, a changing sets of judgments. In manufacturing, the measure of what’s good and what’s bad stays pretty constant because you are always being measured against the same people, against the same standards. In service, I deal with this person; they have one set of standards. The next person I deal with has got a different set of standards. So in a lot of ways, it is more difficult in service because your stands keep changing on you.