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As the service sectors play an increasingly important role in all economies worldwide, service executives and professionals are well advised to recognize two main pathways to achieving sustainable success in services, namely, enhancing the strategic differentiation and operational excellence of their service enterprises; obviously, these executives and their employees need to develop the knowledge and skills required to achieve such success. This book discusses actionable methodologies needed to generate creative ideas, including deciding on which ones to pursue, how to justify projects financially, how to manage the development projects for innovative services, how to reach out to customers, and how to offer them superior service support.

Service industries. --- strategic differentiation --- operational excellence --- service excellence --- engineers and service professionals --- skills and knowledge --- innovation and technology

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For years, automotive supplier GAFFER has been able to survive using its old management and production practices. But times have been changing and GAFFER's future looks bleak. Jake is a retired production planner, reflecting on his long history with the GAFFER factory and what is currently happening. He wonders how things might change as their main customer wants a completely new part to be not only produced, but also designed at GAFFER. Just when the old management is about to mess up the relationship with the customer, there is a new factory manager. He starts turning the factory around and Jake shares all of the juicy stories with his coffee mate, Ben.

Production management --- Organizational change --- Automobile supplies industry --- change management --- collaborative design --- management training --- manufacturing management --- operational excellence --- organizational knowledge --- people development --- quality management --- supply chain management --- teamwork

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bpost is Belgium’s leading postal operator and universal service provider. bpost offers 
addressed and unaddressed mail services, and efficient, high-quality business and 
administrative communication solutions. bpost is well-positioned on the Belgian parcel 
delivery market thanks to the wide range of delivery options and an outstanding international 
network. 

The project developed in this thesis was undertaken in the Financial and Accounting 
department of bpost (F&A), within a team supporting the department in terms of process improvement and operational excellence: the F&A process team. Recently, F&A experienced several organizational changes, including the creation of a shared service center named “Global Services Operations” (GSO) in April 2016. As key actor of the operational excellence within F&A, the F&A process team wants to improve itself. They expect a fresh, impartial, analytical and scientific approach regarding their work. They want to apply the best practices of their colleagues/(competitors) to better satisfy their clients (namely F&A and particularly the GSO) and their management. Thus, the project consists of the evaluation and optimization of the F&A Process team through the axes of methodology, organization, communication, tools and systems, change management and services offered. 

In a first phase, audits have been carried out. On the one hand, it helped develop a better understanding of the context; on the other hand, it allowed to establish the evaluation of the F&A process team through its “present state”. Moreover, research was performed in the scientific literature as well as on the internet. Then, internal and external benchmarking was 
conducted. Firstly, knowledge was shared with the process teams of other departments within 
bpost. Secondly, benchmarking with advanced companies in terms of business process 
management and continuous improvements was accomplished. Afterwards, the expectations 
of the F&A process team’s clients have been collected. Finally, the outputs of all these approaches have been gathered and analyzed. All this led to the formulation of 
recommendations in each of the investigation domains: methodology, organization, 
communication, tools and systems, change management and services offered.

Business process management, postal operator, operational excellence, continuous improvement, organization, methodology, services offered, tools and systems, communication, change management, process improvement --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Comptabilité & audit