第 3 单元班次 1 视频课程

I would like to start this module on productivity by sharing a little quote

with you. I will read the quote, and you'll have to

guess the person who said this. Here we go.

The conservation of all national resources is only preliminary to the larger question

of national efficiency. I'll give you a hint.

It was a US President. Obama, George W., Ronald Reagan.

Turns out the person who said this was Theodore Roosevelt.

More than a 100 years ago Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote a wonderful book

known as The Principles of Scientific Management.

This was the opening line of the book. Productivity was a major theme a 100 years

ago and it's still a very current topic today.

We will start out our module on productivity with this first session in

which I will introduce some more academic definitions of productivity.

What I love about Taylor's work though, it's very much driven by observing people

in action. And so, the rest of the module, I will

promise you, will be much more hands on. As mentioned previously, we can define

productivity as a ratio between the units of output produced and the input that is

used. For example, we can define labor

productivity as four units per labor hour. Units might be insurance claims, it might

be vehicles or it might be patients. And so that, you can think about the

output produced. The vehicles, the insurance claims or the

patients per labor hour as a productivity measure.

Notice that those are exactly the processing time that we discussed

previously. The beauty of this example is that the

only input is labor time. If you think about affirmative, very

high-level perspective, there are many other input factors, including capital,

labor, materials, services at the front users and energy.

People refer to the multifactor productivity as the output divided by the

dollar values of all of these input factors.

Now, stick with the example for labor productivity a little longer, what keeps

us from having a perfect productivity. Think about the output in the productivity

definition as productive time or value add time, and the input as the total time.

Productivity is then simply the percentage of labor time that is spent productively.

Now, clearly, you cannot have the productivity, in this case, of higher than

a 100%. You can never get more than 60 productive

minutes out of a worker per hour. Similarly, if you think about the energy

efficiency of your house, you might measure the output as the temperature

gains that you have in your living room. And the input as the amount of oil or gas

that you burn in the basement in the heater.

Again, you will never generate more heat in the living room than you have consumed

in terms of primary energy in the basement.

The interesting question both of these example are really what reduces a

productivity. This gets us to the idea of waste and

inefficiency. Wastes are those things that are driving

down productivity, and are really at the heart of understanding the productivity in

an operation. With the concept of inefficiency in mind,

let's revisit the example from the introduction.

This was a group of call centers that were benchmarked along the dimensions of

responsiveness and productivity. For a call center, it is easier to achieve

a high productivity. Just staff so that your utilization is

really, really high. Now, the problem with that, of course, is

that your responsiveness will be very poor if you have a high level of utilization.

On the other hand, you can increase your responsiveness if you keep your

utilization very, very low. Good for your responsiveness, bad however

for you productivity. Thus, there exist attention between those

two forces, responsiveness and productivity.

Now, consider call centers A, B, and C. All of these call centers are on a line

that we previously defined as the efficient frontier in the industry.

This means that there is no player, no company, no call center that dominates

competitor A, B or C. And when I say, dominates, I mean, firms

that are both faster than we are and at the same time, also cheaper.

Now, you notice that competitor D is not on the frontier.

For competitor D, we have a distance to the frontier.

And that is what an inefficiency looks like at this very high level perspective.

Let's bring the concept of the efficient frontier to life by looking at some data

from the US airline industry. What I'm showing here is on the x-axis,

I'm plotting the efficiency of the major US carriers.

Here, efficiency is measured by how much it costs an airline to produce a number of

seat miles. On the y-axis, I'm showing what the

airline is able to command in terms of its prices for these miles.

Observe the frontier. Observe how these airlines are lining up

on a line that looks like this. On the one extreme, you have Hawaiian,

which is not able to get high prices but because of its very focused route

structures, able to provide an amazing efficiency.

On the other extreme, you have US Airways. The company is clearly able to command

high prices but has a horrible efficiency. You'll notice here how Southwest has been

able to break that frontier and shift it upwards to a new level.

Southwest entered this market at many routes.

But providing its superior operations, allowing it to charge almost the same

prices as these legacy carriers. Yet, operating at an amazing level of

productivity. Now, the data that I just showed you was

data for the year 1996. Let's take a look what has happened in the

airline industry since then. This is updated data from 2011.

运营管理概论（中文版）

Avis

Enseigné par

Christian Terwiesch

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