Failure demand -- can you do more with less?

[Aimless]

I came across the concept of "falure demand" here, and found some more info about it here.



From the first link:

"Take, for example, the contact centres that are the staple of the outsourcing industry. As customers, we know they are always busy – but most of their work is waste. Vanguard Consulting, which specialises in service organisation, estimates that, in financial services, 20 to 60 per cent of all calls represent 'failure demand' – demand caused by a previous error. In telecoms, the police and local authorities, a staggering 80 or 90 per cent of calls occur because of the same failure to provide proper service the first time around."

I've read similar arguments with regard to the social care system – that much of the apparent demand could be stripped out if people were just dealt with more quickly – and if there was a focus on doing exactly what the customer wants and needs, so that they get what they want first time. Instead we often find a system driven by central targets, where people keep getting what they don't want.

Where my dissatisfaction over the coffee and cake is soon forgotten, the impact on people's lives of poor systems in public services is far more profound.

The second link is a little muddled, but includes a brief discussion about the [ironic ] failure that may result from setting up the reduction of failure-demand as an explicit target.





Seems to me that this concept is very relevant to both private enterprises as well as public ones. I have no numbers, but, from the inside, failure demand--and ill-advised responses to the problems it represents--are among the greatest problems in my country's welfare. Now more than ever, since we're becoming even more obsessed with assorted targets and numbers that may not always be very interesting.

[Aimless]

And here is a post that discusses one of my favourite hobbies: doing more with less.

Funding cuts at Universities are in the news again today. I heard someone from one of the Unions responding with the old classic “We can’t be expected to do more with less.”

Expect to hear variations on “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” time and again over the next few years as cut follows cut follows cut. Union officials and opposition MPs will tell us that it’s inevitable that a 20% cut in a budget will lead to a 20% cut in a service.

Is it inevitable? I think it is if you have an archetypal public sector mindset. Where your only response to a cut in your budget is to cut your service – with the people you serve being the ones who lose out. Where you put out a press release saying how terrible it is that services will be cut, when what you really mean is that budgets have been cut – and your response is to cut the service. Not, perhaps, to consider how you could offer a different service with less money.

But are you telling me that there aren’t ways that services could be delivered differently – saving money whilst also improving services? I’m pretty sure that we’ll be reaching limits in terms of the obvious cost savings – I wouldn’t want to be in the Post-It Note sector in the coming years. Yet perhaps it’s time to start thinking a bit more radically – about ways to tackle failure demand for example.

Perhaps we also need to start challenging vested interests a bit more. I can’t say I truly believe that the BMA have the best interests of patients at heart, for example. They say they’re looking after us, but I think we all know who they’re really looking after. And are University academics really the selfless souls we’re told they are? Or are many of them unmanageable mavericks who need to be dragged into the modern world where, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s not as much money around as there once was.

http://www.thesocialbusiness.co.uk/b...ore-with-less/





So, if you have a service that costs a lot of money due to waste, due to not doing it right the first time, etc... is it theoretically possible that you can provide the same service--or even a better one--at a lower cost by reducing the waste, by doing more things right the first time around?

Would it hold true for services offered by private companies as well, or are they assumed to be magically super-efficient?

[EyeKhan]

This is very intersesting Amy. To use a tired business cliche, if you shift the paradigm a little, Dell's support site isn't about customer service, its a fail safe to catch all the fuckups they make in building and documenting their machines and associated software. Get it right the first time and you don't need a support site. Right?

On the other hand, its also an indication of the complexity of the product they sell and of the variable skill and knowledge of their customer base. For the user error support calls, it may not be possible to produce a product their entire customer base can work without significant help. And in the Age of Communication, a few customers too incompetant to get their PC to work can make enough noise to hurt Dell's reputation. Because inexperienced and incompetant people are free to buy Dell products, and because Dell doesn't want to spend the money necessary to document their product to the point these morons are all covered, they spend money on a call center. Probably the call center is more cost effective overall.

And their PCs break, so they have to have the call center anyway. Its easy to make the call center flexible enough to handle real PC problems and the dummies. Of course they could always improve their reliability... maybe that's not cost effective either.