Going forward, the following factors should be taken into consideration.

Delivery. Much of the inmate feedback centered on introducing the course earlier into the incarceration period, which would give more time to absorb and reflect on concepts taught. Due to funding restrictions, the pilot was performed during the final prerelease stage of incarceration, which coincided with a flux of other prerelease programs. Timing was very tight and did not allow for much learning reinforcement and those requiring additional coaching. Earlier introduction during the treatment phase spread over more training sessions would be more beneficial through more practice under supervision.

Follow-up courses. Lack of follow-up is a major problem after behavior training. While marked change was observed during the program, the tendency is to resort to default learned behavior without supervision. For example, in the case of a drug addict, there are many other new problems to deal with once they are sober. This requires readiness to face reality and to take responsibility for their actions. Follow-up programs available upon release would provide direction and support for ongoing family and work problems outside prison, and act as a valuable network for participants to meet regularly and discuss mutual problems similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous framework.

Family inclusion. After an inmate is released, the family plays a very important part in helping him stay away from crime. However, these familial bonds are stressed greatly when the inmate is incarcerated. Upon release, even though the intention is to help, the result is often misunderstood. A modified version of the inmate training for family members would help to create better awareness and understanding of the inmate's issues and perspectives as well as provide support and reinforce his learning and behavioral changes.

Measurement. The existing measurement criterion-that is, job retention rate-is heavily influenced by many external factors that are outside the control of the study. Introducing the program at an earlier treatment phase of incarceration would allow measurement of behavior within the controlled prison environment that is more accurate.

Summary and Conclusion

The main purpose in writing this chapter is not only to share the wonderful achievements made by our "boys," but also to encourage you, the reader, to explore the many opportunities waiting to be unlocked by TOC. Looking back, our first challenge was how to implement TOC within a society as efficient as Singapore. The answer is that TOC is so ubiquitous that it can be used to benefit all. We just need to open our minds and look for opportunities outside traditional industries. In this regard, instead of asking "why?", perhaps we should be questioning our assumptions as to "why not?"

In many ways, designing this course has been a reawakening to the powerful yet elegant simplicity of the core concepts underpinning TOC. If the goal of TOC is to teach the world to think, then we need to dissect what is at the core of TOC and impart that to the masses. Compared to many corporate clients who can demonstrate technically perfect trees, many inmates walked away from the course with just a vague memory of the sequence or terminology of the actual TOC process steps. Having applied TOC to their personal conflicts and daring to honestly question and examine their underlying logical thinking processes, however, the core principles and essence of TOC will remain with them for a lifetime.

Currently we are working on a project with the Singapore Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sport to work with People with Disabilities (PWDs) to achieve their full potential and function independently by overcoming their personal constraints using TOC TP tools. On a completely different level, we recently delivered a professional development TOC TP seminar to CPA Australia accountants. Regardless of whether the audience is an inmate, disabled, or a white-collar professional, it is clear that these same TOC TP tools can equally impact lives at any level. By having the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants, it is indeed a privilege for us, as TOC practitioners, to be able to take others less fortunate along for the view.

About the Author.

Christina Cheng is the Singapore Director for TOC for Education (TOCfE) and runs her own consultancy business. She has spearheaded several new TOCfE initiatives outside of the traditional school framework and has trained diverse adult and youth audiences within government organizations and the social services sector in Singapore using TOC in behavior applications.

Before her involvement with TOCfE, Christina was a financier and private equity manager with a major European bank covering the North and South East Asian markets. She is an Australian, married with two children, and resides in Singapore.

SECTION VII.

TOC in Services *

CHAPTER 28.

Services Management

CHAPTER 29.

Theory of Constraints in Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

CHAPTER 30.

Customer Support Services According to TOC

CHAPTER 31.

Viable Vision for Health Care Systems

CHAPTER 32.

TOC for Large-Scale Healthcare Systems *

As a burgeoning segment of many economies, Services offer incredible opportunities for improvement using TOC concepts. How the tools of TOC work for these environments and how to implement them is discussed for technical, scientific and professional services, customer service support, medical practice, and hospitals. Recall in the last section on Thinking Processes we had a chapter on the use of TOC in education and a chapter on the use of TOC in prisons. The application of TOC in these areas has produced dramatic results, as the chapters in this section will show. These chapters feature the use of Critical Chain, Buffer Management, and the TOC Thinking Processes explained in earlier sections to great effect in services environments. Services impact on company revenue and profit is challenged by shortened product life cycles, and increasing process and product complexity. TOC methods help ensure that services actions flow in a manner to support escalating demand for services while at the same time retaining financial viability for services within the business.

CHAPTER 28.

Services Management

Boaz Ronen and Shimeon Pass

Introduction.

Service organizations usually strive to excel in the professional or technical aspects of the services they provide to customers. However, managerial improvements have a huge potential for enhancing shareholders' value of the typical service organization. In this chapter, value enhancement will be the main criterion for examining the potential and importance of the traditional versus the more modern managerial concepts and tools. In business organizations, the firm's value is defined as the discounted cash flow (Ronen and Pass, 2008a). In non-profit organizations, the goal is to increase the relevant performance measures versus the organization's goal (Ronen et al., 2006).

In order to improve the performance and value of an organization, we identify its main value drivers (Ronen and Pass, 2008a, Chapter 19). A value driver is any important factor that significantly affects the value of the firm. The potential value drivers are identified by a focused review and analysis of the organization. In service organizations, typical value drivers are increasing sales Throughput, increasing information technology (IT) Throughput, reducing lead times, and changing measures of performance.

The scope of our discussion on Service Management covers organizations such as: Banks (Ronen and Pass, 2007) Insurance companies (Eden and Ronen, 2007) Cellular phone operators and providers (Ronen and Pass, 2008b) Telcos (Ronen and Pass, 2008b) Credit card companies (Geri and Ronen, 2005) Hospitals and health care service providers (Ronen et al., 2006) Law courts Professional services: law, accounting, consultation, engineering, design, IT consulting, etc. (Ronen and Pass, 2008a) Retail companies and chains (Ronen and Pass, 2008a) Copyright 2010 by Boaz Ronen and Shimeon Pass.

Hospitality industry Education (Goldratt and Weiss, 2006)

Challenges in Service Management

In the beginning of human civilization, people were struggling against the hardships of life-most of the population was involved in the production of food, housing, clothing, and defense against enemies. The advancement of civilization relieved the hardships of life, the standard of living has been elevated, and today most people provide services to other people.

Approximately 80 to 95 percent of the global workforce is employed in the service sector. The other 5 to 20 percent work in either the manufacturing or the agriculture sectors. In contrast to the high importance of the service sector to the global economy, and unlike the production sector, management practices used by the service organizations are not necessarily the state-of-the-art management practices.

From the authors' experience in implementing Theory of Constraints (TOC) and other value-focused concepts and tools in dozens of service organizations worldwide, significant changes can be achieved quite easily for the benefit of all the service organization's stakeholders.

This gap in the use of management practices between the production and the service sectors stem from several reasons. We will first focus on factors that make the service sector different.

What Makes Service Management Distinctive?

Service management has several unique characteristics: The outcome of a service is not physical in its nature.

There is a large variance among service organizations (even within an industry) in terms of customers, service types, service providers, and service procedures.

The goal of service organizations is not always clear, particularly in nonprofit organizations.

Measurement and control are not trivial.

In service, the customer is often part of the process.

Service cannot be made in advance or stored as inventory.

Entities within the service process are not always visible or physical.

Bottlenecks within the service processes are, in many cases, hard to detect.

Many of the service organizations are nonprofit organizations.

Service organizations are usually labor intensive.

In many service industries, operations and core processes require high levels of IT capabilities. In these organizations, IT applications development resources are permanent bottlenecks (Pass and Ronen, 2003).

In most service organizations, there exists a high percentage of fixed costs-usually much higher than in a manufacturing firm.

One might get the impression that because of these characteristics, service organizations cannot utilize TOC and other practices developed by the manufacturing sector. The next paragraphs will show that this is not the case. Moreover, due to the existing gap in the implementation, service organizations have a huge potential for value enhancement.