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A validation Study of House of Quality key performance indicators
The present case study focuses on the Dutch labour union De Unie. Recently, De Unie started its
journey to discover new concepts of working. For example; a new building with different features to
facilitate new ways of working was built in the year 2003. Within 2006 De Unie started the first
online labour union in the Netherlands; “the online union” (De Internetvakbond). Labour unions
worldwide are facing a decline in the number of members for almost twenty years now (Greene
2000, Ward 2002, Heery 2004). Problems on recruitment and retention of members are the primary
concern for unions to identify new concepts that adapt to the needs of the changing workforce and
rejuvenate the traditional union. Also in the Netherlands unions are challenged with the above
described decline in the number of members.
In essence a labour union centres on maintaining the delicate balance in the group-individual
member relationship. The latter is shifting as a consequence of two main forces. First, the changing
power balance altering the traditional configurations and relations in the market; second, the growth
of the internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT). The latter accelerate
the velocity of information and business processes and turn the group-individual relationship on its
head, due to the emergence of ICT-enabled individualization.
Fortunately, the leadership of De Unie is aware of the significance of the aforementioned forces and
the urgent need to develop a new union concept that is more responsive to the members’
contemporary needs. It merely started an online union as an experiment to rejuvenate the
organizational concept that would fit to the needs of the “new workforce” and new members.
Hence, understanding members’ needs for individualization and reconciling these with the
requirements of the group is a precondition to the online union’s success. At present, there is a lack
of information regarding members’ identities and motives. Such data is vital to plot an adoption
strategy for the online union. Therefore, this research seeks to provide insights about members’
identities and motives in relation to the online union. Moreover, it provides recommendations on
how De Unie can improve its processes to align the online union with the conventional organization,
which is rooted in the co-located form of conducting work, that the majority of members are familiar
and comfortable with.
1.2 Theories of service improvements
In order to translate customer’s requirements into the development process of new products or
services, nowadays different methods exist to control, measure, manage and improve quality in
different areas. One method to measure the quality of a service is the SERVQUAL model of
Parasuraman et al (1985). The model determines the quality of a service by measuring customer’s
expectations and perceptions on different service attributes. A gap exists when the expectation of a
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