Page 274 - Operations Strategy

ImPoRTAnCE–PERfoRmAnCE mAPPIng 249
● The ‘excess?’ zone – The question mark is important. If any competitive factors lie in
this area their achieved performance is far better than would seem to be warranted.
This does not necessarily mean that too many resources are being used to achieve
such a level, but it may do. It is only sensible, therefore, to check if any resources that
have been used to achieve such a performance could be diverted to a more needy
factor – anything that falls in the ‘urgent-action’ area, for example.

example TAg Transport
TAG Transport is a successful logistics company that is reviewing one of its fastest-growing
services – an overnight, temperature-controlled delivery service for chilled food. It is par-
ticularly keen to improve the level of service that it gives to its customers. As a first stage
in the improvement process it has devised a list of the various aspects of its operations
performance:
● Price/cost – the price (including discounts etc.) that it can realise from its customers and the
real internal cost of providing the service.
● Distribution quality – the ability to deliver goods in an undamaged state and its customers’
perceptions of the appearance of its vehicles and drivers.
● Order/dispatch quality – the courtesy and effectiveness of its customer-facing call centre
staff.
● Enquiry lead-time – the elapsed time between an enquiry from a new customer and pro-
viding a fully specified proposal.
● Drop time – the earliest time each morning when delivery can be made.
● ‘Window’ quote – the guaranteed time window around the drop time within which deliv-
ery should be made.
● Delivery performance – the proportion of actual deliveries made within the quoted
‘window’.
● Delivery flexibility – the ability to change delivery destination.
● Volume flexibility – the ability to provide extra capacity at short notice.
● Documentation service – the reliability of documents such as temperature control charts
supplied with each delivery.
Based on its discussions with customers, the laboratory manages to assign a score to each of
these factors on the 1 to 9 scale. A score of 1 for ‘importance’ means that the factor is extremely
important to customers and 9 means that it has no importance. For performance, a score of
1 means that TAG is considerably and consistently better than any of its competitors; a score
of 9 means that it is very much worse than any competitor. TAG plotted the importance and
performance rating they had given to each aspect of performance on an importance–perfor-
mance matrix. This is shown in Figure 7.7. It shows that the most important issue, delivery
performance, is also where the company performs well against its competitors. Several issues
need improvement, however, and three urgently: enquiry lead-time, order/dispatch quality
and delivery flexibility are all relatively important yet the company scores poorly against its
competitors.

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