Varia Ranah - Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam

463 Varia Ranah: Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam different customers, making it difficult to ensure a consistent service delivery (ibid). Thirdly, the inseparable production and consumption of services (Zeithaml, 1981) means that the service cannot be engineered in a manufacturing plant. Instead, the service is often highly affected by the customer, and the service organisation have therefore less control over the quality (Parasuraman et al., 1985). According to Ahlstrom (2004), prioritisation and recovery from failure are more important in the service sector. Some researchers suggest that Lean service should be radically different from Lean in manufacturing. Seddon et al. (2011) argue that reducing failure demand, which is demand caused by “failure to do something or something right for the customer” (Seddon & Caulkin, 2007), is the most important aspect to increase efficiency in service processes. The time and resources needed to fulfil failure demand can be used to fulfil value demand, which customers demand. The major reason for failure demand is an inability of a system to absorb the variety of customer demands (Seddon et al., 2011). A far-reaching standardisation that reduces the flexibility of the system will lead to increased failure demand and decreased efficiency of the service process (Brandt and Stigendahl, 2012). In addition, customers have diverse needs and expectations of the service, which means that it is difficult to find one definition of value and waste within the service organisation. UNDERSTANDING THE LEAN CONCEPT IN PUBLIC SECTOR The discussion about using Lean in the public sector has been an interesting topic for more than 20 years, starting with the idea of using Lean in healthcare settings. Researchers argued that Lean tools and techniques could be used in healthcare without any empirical data that could support (or contradict) this (Souza, 2009), or based on general experience and common sense (see e.g. Jacobs and Pelfrey, 1995; Spear, 2005; Whitson, 1997). The first empirically based studies on Lean in a healthcare context were published in 2002 (Souza, 2009). Those papers were mainly case studies of an implementation of a single Lean tool or principle in a healthcare setting, so lacked a view of Lean as a