Service Industry Companies

Ramaswamy (1996) suggested that companies that provide services normally conceive of a process as a sequence of activities needed to perform transactions that help to provide their services. To define processes is often problematic involving a range of complexities relating to customers, human behavior, and company structure. To organize the company around business processes, it is necessary to focus on external customers because business processes usually start and end with them. Processes have a line of activity which begins with an understanding and assessment of what the external customer wants and finishes with the external customer gaining what he or she needs and requests. The customer is always central within service organizations structured by process, when the key operational objective is to offer the customer more value in less time and with less cost. This chapter examines four small companies that attempted to do this through the introduction of new technologies.