Vanguard Method as opposed to the traditional managerial thinking typically found in many organisations ( Jaaron and Backhouse, 2012).
The Vanguard Method embraces the principle that employees need to think, analyse, judge, and make decisions on the work on hands. Therefore, team members training is not the focus in the preparation process for this kind of job, it is actually educating them on “why” a failure happen and then finding ways to eliminate it from the system. To accommodate for the requirements of the Vanguard Method, managers’ role shifts from command-and-control to supporters. This keeps managers very close to their employees to interact with their work when necessary. Bhat et al. (2012) provide a constructive view about the interactive leadership style and organisational learning. According to them, the capacity of an organisation to learn how to learn, to change old ways of doing things, and to produce original knowledge is positively related to interactive leadership styles. Due to this type of relationship and due to the whole service processes being owned by team members, the structure of the organisation changes. The organisation becomes organically structured ( Jaaron and Backhouse, 2014).
The Vanguard Method in practice
The above philosophy usually follows three main practical steps of “check-plan-do” for implementation. These steps are summarised in Table II.
Check. This stage aims at understanding the system and why it behaves in such a way that failure demand is achieved. A specially formed team, called the check team, from the workplace collates information about what customers expect and want from the organisation and what matters to them most, they need to be able to use views of different people involved in the problematic system to build the “real situation” (Checkland, 1995). Once the team understands the type of demand received and how capable the system is to respond to it, it can start to map the flow of processes in the system. For this purpose, a visual representation of each operation carried out in the workplace is developed as a flow chart. Identification of waste (actions not adding any value from the customer’s point of view) present in the service operations flow is then carried out (Seddon, 2008). All processes classified as waste are marked in red on the process flow chart. While processes that add value from a customer’s point of view are marked in green.
Plan. This stage starts with redesigning the processes flow charts taking into account what has been learned by considering the customer “wants” and then mapping out the new service system design. Typically, this stage is focussed on minimising non-value adding activities from a customer point of view. The final step in the “plan” process is to build performance measures and the future system success criterion. This is usually how good employees are in creating a value demand and the percentage of value demand out of the total demand received ( Jaaron and Backhouse, 2012).
Do. At this stage the new design is used in an experimental environment with the check team using the new model after it has been discussed with the people doing the work. The new processes are induced gradually with careful observation of both employees’ reaction to it and customers feedback. The processes are tested, re-designed, and re-tested again to make sure that customers get the best possible service before going fully live. This is much slower process than the check phase as the slogan at this stage is to “do it right rather than do it quick” ( Jackson et al., 2008).
The Vanguard Method cycle starts with the “check” stage in order to show business managers the failings of their current system, and to provide them with a solid evidence for the need to change the way they think and manage things ( Jackson et al., 2008).
To ensure continuous improvement of the new system, the check-plan-do cycle is a continuous cycle (Seddon, 2008; Jackson et al., 2008). It is, therefore, a learning system by itself: the process of acquiring knowledge and taking action to improve the situation is continuous ( Jackson et al., 2008). In addition to continuously altering business processes to improve the service offered, the Vanguard Method cycle involves the identification of new demands coming in to the service department. This is followed by designing new processes to ensure dealing with new demands as value demands (Seddon, 2008).
4. Research methodology
A case study approach is adopted in this research inquiry in order to build an understanding of the nature of the research phenomena (Voss et al., 2002). Case studies have the advantage of being able to answer questions like “what”, “how”, and “why” (Yin, 2009). This accommodates the type of question presented at the beginning of this paper. Two case studies were chosen with the help of “extreme case sampling” technique (Patton, 2002; Creswell, 2004) that displayed evidence of full employment of the Vanguard Method in their logistics service operations. An earlier research work conducted with the help of the Vanguard Method consultant of these two case studies helped researchers in confirming that the Vanguard Method is fully employed in their logistics operations, and also ensured easy access to both case studies.
According to Aastrup and Halldórsson (2008), the use of case studies in logistics management research is an enabler for the causal depth required for understanding the real domain of logistics operations and its performance. Case study research design typically has the unique strength in providing a full range of evidence through the use of multi-sources of data, which can achieve data triangulation (Voss et al., 2002). For this purpose, the mixed methods design (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 1998) is used as the technique for conducting the research process. Three different sources of data collection methods are used in the two case studies; these are semi-structured
What is the particularity of vanguard method?
Why we need this method in logistics?