Your primary care physician operates a sound business practice that, at times, seems to suffer from several forms of waste. In your role as a dedicated patient engaged in the study of operations management, you are in a unique position to offer an analysis of your doctor's business operation to provide recommendations for improvement.
Consider the common interpretation of service processes in use at many organizations, which is used to identify four variants of a service process:
- The process that is formally defined and recorded in a business document.
- The process that everyone generally believes exists.
- The process as it actually exists.
- The process that should exist to deliver what the customer really wants.
Using your arrival at the doctor's office as a starting point in the process, create a document that focuses on the process of visiting your doctor for a flu shot. Be sure your document incorporates the following:
- Introduction - describe what you intend to do and how you will approach the task.
- A simple flow chart that maps the sequence of operations for variant #1 and/or #2 above. While you may need to make certain assumptions in your description of variants #1 and #2, your process map should include, at a minimum, all components of the process that are visible to the patient. You may choose to combine your analysis of the first two variants due to lack of information on either one.
- A flow chart that maps the process that actually exists (variant #3).
- A flow chart that maps the process according to variant #4, as you believe it should be.
- Above each flow chart, include a paragraph describing the key process components and identify potential problems or elements of waste in the process map that follows