Electronic Coordination Mechanisms for Service Task Allocation

In the wake of quality and time management, increasing emphasis has been placed on service quality. Maintenance and customer service are personnel-intensive divisions and precise monitoring of the personnel is difficult. An organizational response to this situation is to increase the freedom and scope of action of the service specialists through the combination of market-like allocation mechanisms and incentive structures. On the one hand, service specialists will be free to select their tasks within the limits of some organizational rules and, on the other hand, their salary will be coupled to internal prices for the fulfillment of tasks. These prices also reflect the customer's feedback. We will present the organizational vision, model assumptions, and a concept for the implementation of an electronic service task allocation system for SIEMENS AG. At the core of the system are electronic coordination mechanisms (ECM) that interact with an electronic order book and the service specialist's account. The ECMs reflect the migration from traditional dispatch to an internal market. This organizational change is facilitated by the introduction of an information system that may become part of an integrated service and customer information system, based on EDI and linked to internal controlling applications.