In what follows, we will demonstrate that in services, even more than in industries, the two parts concerned with systematic management are necessary for a successful application of the two parts concerned with scientific management. The reason for this has to do with the fact that the quality of a service is much more variable and dependent on the activities of the employees concerned and, therefore, it will be more important to frame the primary criteria adequately and to prevent the employees dealing with the clients from losing sight of these primary criteria.
This also means that moving upward the level at which criteria of the first type are transformed in criteria of the second type is much more likely to result in a decline of overall performance. Improvement and formalization of information streams so as to make decision makers more accountable for decisions of the first type. The internal communication at the office was extended and formalized. In addition to the already existing personnel department, the postwar years witnessed the establishing of an organization and statistics department with the task to gather, analyze, and process all the information needed by management.
The reorganization served as a way to monitor the bank’s activities better and more efficiently. The new technology not only served for a more efficient, faster, and cheaper processing of the clients’ transactions but also created the possibility to deliver far better management information about the process. The bookkeeping department could now make up daily balance sheets, which gave the management an overview of the most important changes in the balance sheet figures. (Lindblom 1999)
These developments were accompanied by several measures to improve the bottom-up communication. For instance, a suggestion box was installed. By financial rewards, employees were encouraged to share their ideas on the improvement of methods and procedures with management. One of the ideas that were actually introduced included mentioning a telephone or correspondent’s number on the banks outgoing letters so that clients could make direct contact with the right person or department.
Although this measure was primarily aimed at increasing client satisfaction, it enabled lower level employees, and, of course, their direct supervisors, to feel themselves accountable for the client’s satisfaction with the bank’s services and thereby with the impact of their lower level decisions on the performance of the bank as a whole. It meant that lower level employees were at least encouraged to think in terms of primary criteria. Changing technological, economic, and political realities exert increasing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to improve resource utilization and productivity dramatically.
Industry analysis shows that while development costs and time to approval have risen, the probability of technical success in many cases is declining. Such business realities lead to fewer approvals in the face of mounting research and development (R&D) cost. These trends are not sustainable for the pharmaceutical industry. One essential response to the rising cost of drug development is the implementation of advanced capacity management tools and processes.
Used effectively, these tools and business processes can minimize waste and maximize the use of existing scientific talent by ensuring deployment of critical skill sets to the highest value projects at the correct time and in the appropriate quantities. These more advanced tools also enable scenario planning to optimize complex portfolio-wide re-sourcing decisions over an extended future period. Eli Lilly and Company is engaged in the process of leveraging state-of-the-art capacity management tools, technology, and theory to drive rigorous resource utilization and decision-making processes.
The first step in the journey involved a companywide implementation of an enterprise system purchased from the German software company, SAP that integrates project systems, human resources, and valuation and control components in 2001. With this system, the central cross-functional project management organization was able to integrate project plans across the global R&D organizations for new molecules with direct expenses and human resource requirements. Thus, for the first time, planned resource demand versus supply was able to be measured at a high level for all functional organizations engaged in new drug development activities.