Minimization of service disturbance: VSM based case study in telecommunication industry

Abstract

Significant investments in productivity improvement approaches over the past two decades have been embedded in ‘lean’ principles and philosophies within the manufacturing sector. Although the manufacturing sector has focused on offering integrated bundles of physical goods and services via product-service systems with lean principles and philosophies, there has been considerably less adoption of lean methodologies in the service sector. Hence, it is vital to investigate the application potential of lean principles in service processes’ productivity improvement. This manus cript presents the results of a case study performed to improve the service performance of a firm providing plain old telephone services (POTS). The firm provides, among other things, telecommunication related ‘voice-grade telephone services’ employing analog signal transmission over copper loops. The analysis methodology contains tailor-made value stream mapping (VSM) and value stream analysis (VSA), which has been carried out to investigate the current state of the value adding [also including non-value adding (not essential) and non-value adding (essential)] activities involved in the POTS related tasks. A current state value stream map (CSVS-Map) has been developed and VSA has been performed. Based on the CSVS-Map and the results of VSA, a future state value stream map (FSVS-Map) has been developed. Finally, the resulting improved performance of the POTS related tasks has been presented. The goal of this paper was to identify the advantages of implementing lean tools in service processes in the example of the described case study. The main obtained advantages are a 50% decrease in service lead time, which gives the capability to deliver almost double the amount of POTS installation service.