Develop the Departments Within the Company

A discussion of how the key ideas to be found in the paper by Lovelock  'Functional Integration in Services: Understanding the Links between Marketing, Operations and Human Resources' could be applied to address the business issues of the companies I studied in the post session activities. In this assignment I will be looking at the different methods that businesses can utilize in-order to improve and develop the departments within the company by referring to an article by Christopher Lovelock. The departments covered in this article are Marketing, Operations and Human Resources. Referring to these methods I will make an attempt to explain the problems that each firm currently has and how using the methods could help to improve and strengthen the situations they are currently in. From looking at the article by Lovelock you can see that it clearly discusses the links between the three departments and how its ideas can be applied.

A main problem for some organisations is the conflict between departments. Actual consumer satisfaction is affected by the performance of other departments, all company functions should mix together and never one function consider itself more superior to the other to sense, serve and satisfy customers needs sufficiently. So from this we can ask, what weight should be given to the interests of the organization, customers and society? There is no simple answer other then that departments need to work together, overlap and give an good even output for any business to work. In Appendix 3, which refers to British Airways (BA), it can be seen that over the recent years they have focused mainly on increasing revenue and protecting share prices. This is evident in appendix 3, 'BA's TRAVAILS have so far not affected its share price. It has been one of the best performers in the FTSE 100'.

They have succeeded in assuring profit despite BA's 'high quality' reputation being largely jeopardized by the huge staff cuts; 13'000 to be precise, that's a quarter of BA's workforce gone due to Eddington, BA's Chief Executive believing that restoring BA to profitability is priority, an initiative the company call "future size and shape" (Bags of Trouble). In accordance to Lovelock, this initiative has almost certainly been the idea of the operations management who believe profit is a result of augmented efficiency.

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"Effective operations management, above all else, is a practical subject which deals with real issues". However, referring back the article (Bags of trouble), this labour cut may have reduced the running costs dramatically, but certainly at a price, that being the efficient running of the company. Surely this is a real issue therefore reflecting the management breakdown between departments, as if BA chiefs had considered other departments views such as marketing or HR for instance, they may of resolved this disorder. In accordance to Kotler, 'the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The aim is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself. ' From the article it seems evident that there appears to be a great big gap between management, senior staff and ground staff. This gap seems to be partially the result of cost cuts. This has caused a big dependability problem, as employees are unable to rely on each other therefore causing an evitable communication breakdown and because of this high turnover and extra workload, the remaining employees are naturally finding it a struggle to maintain.

BA must address this by filling the gaps, retraining the staff and meeting objectives. BA must fight the struggle by re-positioning themselves in a more suitable market. They seem to be finding the balance of high quality and service rather difficult with all of the cost cuts they have endured as well as profit losses due to negligence. Eddington is tending to think only about the long-term future objectives, and dismissing short term ones.

This can positive in the sense of avoiding of marketing mytopia, but in order for BA to achieve success, thinking short term also is paramount, this way can they meet a realistic and profitable target in the future. Due to the increasing turnover it has become harder for staff to cope with high travel volumes and it seems this is resulting in the problems mentioned in the article. An example of the problems was the many different cases where passengers were stranded overnight.

This would naturally provoke customers to lose respect for BA and believe that quality levels have plummeted; this is confirmed in the quote below by Van Looy that states: "There is a 'mirror' effect - that is, the behaviour and feelings of service employees are reflected in customer perceptions of service quality and hence will affect customer satisfaction". The Road Paint article  is a good example of how departments need to work together if the business is to run smoothly. They have encountered problems because their marketing department had not communicated between the departments.

This lack of communication between them has led to an excess amount of orders being taken by the marketing department, which the operations department could not possibly cater for. The benefits of linkage of resources are - if the functions work together and communicate to begin with, they may have been able to prevent problems from occurring. This would of been useful information for Roadpaint as before promoting the new product the capacity should have been estimated along with the demand so they could establish operations to cope with this. Another benefit is therefore customer satisfaction.

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