For an organization of our size, we need a strong corporate approach. SAHK has consolidated its business logics into a model (Fig. 1) that governs its service under the branding of Conductive Education1 (CE).
At the top are corporate-driven business missions and objectives that are founded on our values and beliefs with CE in the core. The adoption of CE is a way of moving towards a common, shared view of our customers’ needs across the entire staff team. It has become an integral part of our corporate culture. Our definition of CE is philosophical – an upbringing approach focusing on the education of will for building a robust personality. It serves as our guiding philosophy (the second level).
Operationally, CE is a person-centered approach that brings together different areas of development into a united whole in a well-structured environment. This has become our business strategies (the third level) in developing our service blueprint.
The fourth level is our infrastructure and functions including people, service, finance, support and servicescape. This level and the seventh level (customers) have to be closely tied in with the ever changing external environment including service demand and technology advancement, etc.
Traditionally, the basic unit of NGOs is functional departments with a collection of specialists performing narrowly specialized jobs. In a CE organization, work is organized around processes with customers at the centre. Naturally, customers travel through a service unit through a series of taskoriented processes across their entire whole day. We define our business process as a collection of crossdepartmental intervention strategies that creates an output that is of value to the customers. Thus, implementation of CE is founded on redesigning these core business processes (the fifth level).
CE combines individual departmental efforts into a coherent whole. It moves our multidisciplinary specialists out of their own workplace and to view their customers’ needs from a common perspective. It brings them together into a transdisciplinary practice by keeping our guiding philosophy and business strategies in mind while planning and delivering their services.
Continuous quality improvement relies on effective service management (the sixth level). Our management system focuses on managing people and processes with quality effort as a vehicle toward achieving our business objectives.
Last but not least, CE is not only a unique way of service delivery, but also as guidance for building our ‘through-train’ network of business delivery channels (the bottom level). Our service expansion policy is also centered on the business objectives. This has, in turn, reinforced our successful implementation of CE.
This business model has transformed SAHK toward a competitive modern business designed to put our customers first. It is cascaded from the top down but it only works until it has permeated into every corner of the Association and not just a m o n g t h e professionals.
1 Originated in Hungary and founded by Prof. Andr’s Petı.
|