Reality Pull
Description
Frans van der Reep:
'‘Reality pull’ means leaving key knowledge in the heads of your employees and simply facilitating the process that brings the real customer request in contact with the person who can provide the solution.
Instead of starting with the internal structure of the organisation and the ‘schedule push’, the process begins with the competent employee and relating him or her to the actual customer request. The Internet links the customer directly to the supplier of the solution, which means that you can lose the coordinating mid-office and back-office that makes the organisation rigid and expensive - and you can use much cheaper software." (http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/74EDE207-BD67-4D80-AC2B-527F52DA5225/0/EuropeanRetailDigest.pdf)
Discussion
Frans van der Reep:
"A typical example of old school ‘schedule push’ thinking is the Work Order through which the manager or a central system allocates tasks each day. In theory, the employee is being used effectively but to get to this point the organisation has already put in a lot of time and money to bring all the information to one place, the back office, and then a lot more time and money to create a central schedule that divides the work amongst all the people in the most efficient way according to the system. Then it takes more time and money to put the schedules right when, as usually happens, the actual work had to be done differently, when the customer is not satisfied by a standard response. We all know the stories about the high costs of the implementation of a central ERP system and the way employees solve the problems when the reality does not fit the system ‘ideal’.
But the Internet allows us to replace all this expensive complexity with a much simpler ‘reality pull’. Instead of guiding all the information through a central system, we just allow the employee to pick and choose in the same way they buy groceries at the supermarket. The result of this is that it is no longer the manager who determines what needs to be done; it is the customer who is making the choice. The work order is replaced by a marketplace where the employee can select his own work. This means that an employee will coordinate and make his own agreements with the customer without the involvement of a back-office." (http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/74EDE207-BD67-4D80-AC2B-527F52DA5225/0/EuropeanRetailDigest.pdf)
Example
Frans van der Reep:
"For example, Thuiszorg Stad Utrecht - TSU, a Healthcare organisation in the Netherlands, has implemented this approach for its workforce of approximately 500 people, nursing very different patients who stay in their own homes. They have to travel to the homes and on location they can exactly see what is necessary. In the old days the employee would get his weekly schedule on Monday morning at the office. In the new situation, a team receives a box with the work to be done that week. The team is responsible for the nursing of their group of patients within a limited time. The members of the team (the nurses) pick their nursing jobs from that box by a smart phone linked to the central system. The system gives a signal when it detects that a patient will not be nursed in time. When the nurse has finished the job they give the information about time and other remarks to the system by the smart phone and everyone, colleges and manager, and see the results and the remarks. So the system and the manager can control the jobs afterwards. The employee plans the activities according the needs of the reality. And he can improve on a central system. It is the professionals who can interpret the reality in the best way and act as necessary when he or she is on the customer’s side. Besides the possibility to react based on reality, there is another benefit. Employees who are in control of their work have a higher level of personal commitment and are more concerned with the quality of what they produce. This means, for example, that if the work takes longer than expected to complete, they will more likely stay to finish the job. In a time where competition is growing and organisations need to be more and more customer-focused, this direct interaction between the employee and the customer could be a great benefit.
In the TSU project, the employees’ satisfaction has increased because they have more control over their own work. And the clincher is that management can send the bill on Friday afternoon at the end of the same week whereas in the old days it took an average of three weeks to reconcile the planned schedule with the reality. And TSU is making over 50% cost savings in the back-office. The core of ‘reality pull’ is that an organisation no longer plans ahead. They eliminate all the expense and complexity of the intervening systems and react to the actual demand." (http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/74EDE207-BD67-4D80-AC2B-527F52DA5225/0/EuropeanRetailDigest.pdf)
Source
- Article: From Schedule Push to Reality Pull: Reality Pull prefers Retail. By Frans van der Reep. European Retail Digest.
URL = http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/74EDE207-BD67-4D80-AC2B-527F52DA5225/0/EuropeanRetailDigest.pdf