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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 14
A validation Study of House of Quality key performance indicators service exceeds the perception of a service. In order to measure how well different service attributes are able to satisfy the needs of customer the Kano model was developed (Kano, 1984). Kano’s model classifies the attributes into three categories, according to the level of satisfaction. The present study applies the SERVQUAL model to measure the quality of the services offered by the online union. By including Kano’s model we are able to identify how well the different service attributes of the online union are satisfying the needs of the members. The SERVQUAL model only identifies gaps between member’s expectations and perceptions but does not mention how the explored gaps can be closed in order to improve the performance of the online union. Therefore, based on the concept of Tan and Pawitra (2001), the needs of the members identified by the SERVQUAL model will be integrated into the concept of Quality Function Deployment (Akao, 1990). This in order to provide information how De Unie can improve the design the online union. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) represents a powerful structured methodology for exploring and steering interaction between different contributors in the product or service development or improvement process (Tidd 2001). This is also the case when designing IT-related products of services, like in this case the online union. Within the theory of QFD there are two dominant models; the four phase model and Akao’s Matrix of Matrices Model. This research study will make use of the four phase model of QFD. The Four-Phase model divides a product or service development process into four phases. For each phase a matrix in shape of a house is used. In order to translate the needs and requirements of the member into the design process, the needs explored by the SERVQUAL model will be integrated into the first house of the four phase model; the House of Quality (HOQ). The HOQ is used to depict customer requirements, technical measures, target values, and competitive analysis (Eureka and Ryan, 1994). Therefore the HOQ will be an important instrument in this ongoing process of improvement in order to match the needs and requirements of the members and the design requirements of the online union. 15
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