Editorial

Citation

Heap, J. and Burgess, T. (2012), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 61 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2012.07961gaa.001

Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 61, Issue 7.

This issue maintains the journal's mission in engaging with matters of current relevance which include contemporary and perennial issues related to performance and productivity management. The papers in this issue cover challenges that include: how do we make virtual teams work, how can we evaluate the performance of public services, how can we better manage health care, how can we better design manufacturing work and how do electronic supply chains work? All these challenges are of heightened relevance today given the austere conditions that we face in both business and society. The authors of these papers are doing their bit by contributing in some way to meet these challenges – let's hope that their work helps you, the reader, to do your bit.

In the first paper, Ferreira, Pinheiro de Lima and Gouvea da Costa from Brazil concentrate on a growing area of organisational activity, namely virtual teams. Globalisation and the extension of information technology are just two of the pressures contributing to the growth in the importance of this form of working. A key difficulty with such teams stems from their virtuality, i.e. the barriers of time and space make it difficult for team members to collaborate and coordinate their activities. The authors focus on the extent to which members of the virtual team understand their company's goals and performance requirements. The methodology they develop helps the team to appreciate how their performance aligns with the operations strategy and thus assists in their performance improvement. Therefore in addition to the research contribution of their work there is a clear contribution to improving practice.

Cruz, Barata and Ferreira tackle in the second paper one of the key challenges of today's austere times, specifically how can we finance public services effectively and in so doing mitigate the economic and environmental problems of the consumers burgeoning love affair with the automobile? They concentrate their study on public transport in Portugal and examine critically the interaction of central vs local funding on the performance of the companies delivering the services. A key part of their analysis is the impact of subsidies on provision of services and on delivery performance. Their study compares six major, Portuguese, public transport providers and creates a performance “scorecard” to better enable their evaluation. As they point out, performance measurement is a crucial first step to better managing systems; a truism that is as relevant in public services as in any other context.

Improving performance and productivity in other public service areas such as health care is also a major challenge to our society. In their paper Simonen, Viitanen and Blom use a qualitative approach to identify barriers to, and facilitators of, more effective health care management. They interviewed staff in senior managerial roles in large Finnish hospitals to ascertain their willingness to use evidence-based management – what they also call effectiveness data – in their decision making. Various issues were apparent that impeded the use of such data including its poor quality, but managers tended to look to improve the quality of the data rather than discard it. The increasing importance of data, information and knowledge in our society means that increasingly higher productivity will come from making better use of these resources; and therefore research of the kind carried out in this paper will be more and more relevant.

In the fourth paper, two contributors from the USA (Quintana and Leung) describe an approach to industrial work design that uses Bayesian belief networks in conjunction with influence diagrams. They argue that their case study demonstrates that the approach is effective in enabling the views of all stakeholders to be incorporated in to the decision-making process and that a superior work design ensues. The case study focuses on comparing a stand-up sewing cell with a conventional sit-down approach to this area of flow-line manufacturing. The competing work designs are assessed on ergonomic, productivity and cost grounds. Clearly, an approach that improves such parameters and does so cost-effectively, i.e. without being more expensive than conventional approaches, is worth pursuing. Doesn’t such innovation in methods that increase manufacturing productivity meet one of the key requirements of our society; namely its need for increasing GDP?

Jain and Ahuja (India) investigate in the fifth paper a long-standing topic, that of ISO 9000 certification. They carry out a survey of Indian manufacturing companies that have implemented ISO 9000 and look to examine the connections between aspects of ISO 9000 implementation and various areas of manufacturing performance. The data set comprises about a hundred firms of varying sizes and varying periods of ISO adoption. The authors identify a number of significant relationships between particular initiatives and specific performance areas; and highlight how improvement builds over a number of years and then plateaus. It is good to see evidence that ISO can generate some substantive improvements to counter the past criticisms of its use as a marketing tool.

Our final paper is a reflective practice piece in which three US-based authors (Kumar, Eidem and Perdomo) compare the e-commerce elements of the supply chains of two influential, US-based firms: Amazon and Wal-Mart. Although both companies originate from the USA, they differ in that Amazon is the epitome of the e-retailer while Wal-Mart started as a bricks and mortar company that now has a major internet presence. The analysis compares the two companies and demonstrates that although both e-supply chains are efficient and meet customer needs, they still have major challenges to resolve. Studies of this kind show how modern business is a dynamic, competitive place where technology has a major impact and business success often results from good fortune as much as the unfolding of pre-determined plans.

John Heap and Tom Burgess