Need to develop best practices for business related services (BRS)

Abstract

Manufacturing organizations seek to effectively integrate diverse service participants and their resources into a synthesized activity and also to make use of available assets efficiently. In pursuit of these goals companies follow a common strategy of implementing what are called "Best Practices" in the supply chains. Our aim is to examine if the best practices proposed for the manufacturing sector serve to bring about a significant improvements in the service sector. With this objective, we first review some typical interaction characteristics of services and manufacturing functions in detail. Interaction characteristics are heavily influenced by four basic characteristics of services: intangibility, perishability, simultaneity and heterogeneity. Interaction analysis helps us to group these interaction characteristics under major groups. They are 1) Planning 2) Capacity management 3) Flexibility Management 4) Execution 5) Measurement Model 6) Decision Making 7) Transparency. Further we review best practices that have been proposed for the manufacturing sector and their feasibility for considered domain of BRS. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.