Hello there, My name is Beatriz Muñoz-Seca, and I am Professor of Operations Management at IESE Business School. I am here to introduce my service operational course. Operations in services? You might think that operations only apply to supply chains or production in factories. The answer is no. Every company has operations regardless of whether they produce products or services. Moreover, in this course, we shall talk about companies that produce pure services such as financial companies, back offices, lawyers, healthcare, tourism, insurance. However, you must remember that an industrial company also involves service in administration, finance, or commercial service units. Moreover, the after-sale services are right now booming. This is the concept of Sovietization. Why do you need to take a course like this, mainly because many people make operational decisions without really understanding the impact they have. You see company earnings depend on having a suitable operational structure that can provide any service and many managers and services take these decisions out of common sense. Well, let me tell you something. Common sense does not exist. Your common sense is not the same as mine. Why? Because common sense is based on what you have learned and experienced both at individual and company level. This gives rise to most of the informal rules that many companies have like this has worked before so it should work forever, wrong, totally wrong. Let us understand where we stand. There is a huge need to throw ourselves into digital transformation. I believe we are facing a wonderful opportunity. Get rid of tasks that add no value and have technology do them instead. Machines can do many, many things very, very well and human should stop doing them. There are thousands of jobs, repetitive jobs that machines can do 24/7. We need to do this to attain operational efficiency. One way to do so is by industrializing as much as possible in a service delivery. But as we shall see, without harming service excellence. Our main goal is to solve Value Added problems that boosts our company's gross margin. What is the gross margin? The gross margin is revenues minus costs. You need to understand that cost-cutting does not lead to efficiency. Efficiency leads to cost cutting. So forget about cost-cutting. Just forget about it. That is not going to help you at all. What you need to do is to be very efficient. This is one of the course's goals, sustainable efficiency. How do we get there? This course will show you how. But let's start with the dull tasks. I call them F5 tasks after the key that refreshes a computer screen. Huge value, aren't they? Let's get rid of them. Free the time spent on those F5 task, so that people can move on to do graded value added tasks that boost the company's bottom line. Human beings must provide more and more added value. We no longer speak of manpower or workforce, but brainpower or brain force. We need to free those brains in order to have them perform tasks that boost company earnings and provide learning experiences for them. This is part of our efficiency outlook. On this course, we shall discover that a huge amount of time is spent on tasks that add no value whatsoever. Neither for the person nor for the company. That's just a waste of money. A question might pop up into your minds. Do we fire people when we replace them with technology? My answer is no. This course has a mantra, no fire, no hire. Everybody in the company is an investment in know-how, what I call knowledge stock. It is neither feasible nor efficient to waste that. Knowledge is an investment, not a cost, and we need to get a return on that investment. Once we free up time, we should fill it with challenging tasks that boost the gross margin but also improves knowledge stock. My approach is built on efficiency, industrialization, and productivity. They are imperative for survival. It's a win-win approach. The company wins by boosting the gross margin and the employee by taking on new task that entails newer know-how and such know-how cannot be taken away from them. Rather, it enhance their employability. Brain force means new tasks and new task means new challenges and new challenges mean new opportunities, which in turn mean employability. You see if you learn something new, you will have more employment opportunities in other sectors and greater opportunities to increase your own growth. What I'm offering here is a win-win situation for both company and individual and he also proposes that knowledge should be the cornerstone for sustainable efficiency. Let's see how. In services, the client produces the final part of the service jointly with the agent that delivers it. Very tricky. The uncertainty there lies with the agent's ability to solve problems on an individual basis. That is the key, efficient individual problem-solving. How do we get there? By providing such an individualized approach through standardizing and industrializing. It is absolutely crucial to provide an efficient way to solve problems, but watch out, you won't do so by tampering with what the client expects from the service delivery. The main thrust of my approach is based on the problem-solving process. What revolves around knowledge. That's to say what for me is the fundamental core of the operational model in service companies. Simple. To accomplish a task, you need to solve a problem. To solve a problem, you need knowledge and here comes the magic formula. Task equal problem equals knowledge. Knowledge becomes a prime mover that demands analyzing what there is of it, what there should be, and what is missing, and how it is used and developed. To sum up, great challenges lie ahead and we need to have a framework to help us address all of these innovations couple with a perfectly efficient operational structure. I will discover this framework through this course. A KISS service operational framework. KISS, keep it simple and stupid for you to apply immediately and benefit from. Shall we get going?
