Improving Bounce Fitness operations through innovation and organizational change

¶ … Improvement

Innovation and Continuous Improvement

Bounce Fitness has a number of locations across Australia. Although the company has a long history of operations, very little has changed in the company's operating procedures. One of the most salient problems that have been identified is scheduling customers' initial consultations and keeping records up-to-date. These issues need to be address in a timely manner so that the organization can improve its service offerings.

Monitoring and Evaluation Strategies

There are a plethora of different metrics that can be used to monitor and evaluate the organizational strategy. The balanced scorecard is a useful tool for designing strategies along different types of important objectives. Robert Kaplan and David Norton made the Balanced Scorecard popular as they found shortcomings with the traditional management control systems (Balanced Scorecard Institute N.d.). This approach was designed to translate vision and strategy into objectives and measures across four balanced perspectives: the financial perspective, customer perspective, internal process perspective, and the learning and growth perspective. Each perspective is important by itself, however when the four approaches are "balanced" then a type of synergy can emerge that can propel an organization to success.

Current Operational System

The case states that the current data collection and hosting method utilizes the basic spreadsheet. However, there are many more sophisticated software solutions that are already developed and customized for this particular industry. It is suggested that the company use an external consultant to determine their options in regard to modernizing the client data process. It would be interesting if there were a solution that would allow customers to access and even update their own health statistics on a web portal.

Measuring Tools

Quality control represents the act of analyzing processes and monitoring operations to ensure that high quality standards are being met at all times. There are many statistical models that can be used to ensure that the organizations operational objectives are being met. With the advantages of modern technology, these tools can also be used in a real time manner to monitor the quality on a real time basis. This would also represent an ideal subject to bring up to the external consultant. Furthermore, a quality survey should be developed and administered on a regular basis to ensure high quality standards in regard to customer service.

Suggested Improvements

Leadership was identified as being one of the competencies that is required to make a company successful in the long run. A transformational leader can inspire an organization to perform at higher levels. Two of the qualities of such a leader were identified as being humble yet also having a strong sense of dedication or resolve to be successful. Therefore, it is not necessarily one model or the other that can effectively predict the outcome of the company. There must also be some component that accounts for leadership and human resources in the company to predict success. Companies with inspirational leaders can often overcome tremendous challenges and find opportunities for their company to excel.

Emerging Trends

One trend is that a growing number of consumers are becoming more health conscious. As a growing awareness of health issues and obesity is accumulating, many people are becoming more focused on health and fitness issues and becoming more active. Bounce Fitness is certainly on the right side of this trend and should leverage its position to increase its market size and share.

Consulting Opportunities

This is one of the most important aspects of the case. It is recommended that an external consultant be used to help modernize operations. The consultant could help the organization find a software solution to its data problems as well as

It is evident that the organization needs to modernize its operations. Although some of this can be done internally by optimizing leadership and factors such as communication, other aspects will likely be heavily dependent upon external consultants. These consultants can help the organization adopt technology to address many of the organizations needs such as better management of client records as well as the internal hosting of real-time KPIs. These dashboards can represent a wide array of different metrics or information and must be tailored to fit the processes that they represent so that they can offer reliable insights to the state of the organization (Malik 2007).