In its 2017 annual report, the Dairy Farm Group had reported a decline in sales and profits for its Singapore Supermarket and Hypermarket business, with increasing competition cited as the key reason for the lacklustre performance. Peter Goh, an analyst at Singapore Management University's Institute of Service Excellence (ISE) has been tasked with preparing a business pitch to the Supermarkets and Hypermarkets division of the company's Singapore office to help it address some of the challenges it faces. To help raise the performance of the service sector in Singapore, ISE conducts and releases the results of the Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) to both the media and industry, as well as provides research and consulting services. The 2018 CSISG study had revealed "Ease of Getting to Stores" as one of the lowest-rated attributes for the supermarket industry, and Goh believes that rationalising store locations could be a possible answer to the challenges the Dairy Farm Group faced. In his opinion, a geospatial analysis of the company's customers' demographic profile relative to its current store locations would provide some key insights.
In early 2019, Alan Jay, an executive in the Quality, Safety and Risk Management (QSRM) department of Gloria Hospital, a full-service hospital that specialised in children and women healthcare, had been requested to gather insights and seek improvements to the pre-consultation waits at the hospital's Children's Emergency (CE) department. After an initial study, minor schedule adjustments were put into place, with many shifts starting one hour in advance to reduce snowballing of patients awaiting consultation. However, post-implementation data suggested that the patient load to capacity ratios remained uneven across each day of the week. Subsequently, a team of operations professors and students were assembled to join Jay in a second phase of the Children's Emergency Consultation Queue (CECQ) project, started April 2019, to better understand the actual waiting time of patients at the CE.
This case is set in 2018. The Institute of Service Excellence (ISE) at Singapore Management University conducted surveys in Singapore to measure customer satisfaction across 20 industries comprising more than 100 companies, and released the results as Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) every quarter. In the latest CSISG report of the e-commerce sub-sector, Amazon was ranked last in terms of customer satisfaction in Singapore. The results were surprising as Amazon, the global leader in online retail, usually topped the customer satisfaction surveys conducted in the US. Puzzled by its lacklustre performance, James Mckally, senior partner at a Singapore-based marketing consultancy on e-retail, had requested ISE for a detailed analysis. John Lim, as the lead analyst at ISE, was in the process of reviewing the data collected and the analysis that had been generated, in order to derive some useful insights before the proposed meeting. In the latest CSISG report of the e-commerce sub-sector, Amazon was ranked last in terms of customer satisfaction in Singapore. The results were surprising as Amazon, the global leader in online retail, usually topped the customer satisfaction surveys conducted in the US. Puzzled by its lacklustre performance, James Mckally, senior partner at a Singapore-based marketing consultancy on e-retail, had requested ISE for a detailed analysis. John Lim, as the lead analyst at ISE, was in the process of reviewing the data collected and the analysis that had been generated, in order to derive some useful insights before the proposed meeting.