Time and resource management are critical about civil services. Though equipment, supplies, and facilities may be necessary, they are insufficient without human resources who have the knowledge to use them effectively. Obviously, a hospital is just another building without doctors, nurses, and technicians. Of course, some services are technology-based. Only a tiny percentage of telephone calls are operator-assisted nowadays, for instance. Nevertheless, installation, repair, and customer service are labor-intensive. So even in highly automated services enterprises, resource management can still be a vital function.
In Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (PSTS), getting skilled resources when and where they are needed can be a constraint. Clients often want service to start as soon as a contract is signed-if not sooner. If the service produces deliverables, clients generally want them as soon as possible. And they often want resources with specific skills dedicated to their contract. Hence, if the right resources aren’t available, it may be impossible to close the sale. And if key resources are lost after the sale, it may be difficult to deliver the service and impossible to achieve client satisfaction. In virtually all services enterprises, resources are thus key elements in the supply chain. Moreover, when one enterprise provides resources to other enterprises, as in subcontracting relationships, those resources are key elements in its delivery network, too.
Note that these resource supply and delivery networks are not the same as service chains. In a service chain, a series of services enterprises each perform their own service without distributing the resources that perform those services. For a single consumer transaction, separate enterprises might do the advertising, prospecting, sales, credit, rebate, transportation, installation, collection, warranty, repair, and recycling. So the central challenge in a service chain is to coordinate the services, not necessarily acquire resources. That challenge is addressed in later chapters. As seen in the preceding chapter, Replenishment is the traditional TOC application for distribution and supply chains. It was invented for situations where time to resupply is longer than customers will wait for their orders, and reliable forecasting is impossible. Both conditions hold good about civil services exam.
These alternatives are not always mutually exclusive. Some enterprises use a forecast for annual planning, which establishes a budget, and then leave it to individual leaders to hire within that budget. Unfortunately, leaders are sometimes tempted to hire as much as the budget allows, regardless of whether actual market conditions turn out as forecast. Hire-to-deal can be highly responsive to conditions in both the services market and the job market. But its effectiveness rests heavily on the ability of individual leaders to sense where the markets are headed and implement capacity changes accordingly. Therefore, scrambling to fill open positions or shed excess resources is not uncommon, and compromising on the fit between candidates and positions does occur. Moreover, one practice or department may be short on certain skills at the same time another has excess, so individual leaders within the same enterprise may be making opposing resource decisions without knowing it.
Supply-demand matching includes various methods to allocate available supply to prioritized demand or steer demand where capacity is available. Methods include workforce scheduling, complementary services, self-service, cross-training, and price incentives