Global engineering services: Shedding light on network capabilities

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.006
• Author: Mike Gregory,Yufeng Zhang,Andy Neely
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016

Global engineering services: Shedding light on network capabilities

Yufeng Zhang

a

,

*

, Mike Gregory

b

, Andy Neely

b

a

Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, B152TY, UK

b

Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, 17 Charles Babbage Road, Cambridge, CB3 0FS, UK

article info

Article history:

Available online 21 March 2016

Accepted by Mikko Ketokivi

Keywords:

Global engineering services (GES)

Network capabilities

Professional service operations

management (PSOM)

abstract

This paper addresses the operations challenges of effectively managing professional services on a glo bal

scale. The specific context for the study is professional engineering services and particularly those that

are delivered globally eglobal engineering services (GES). Estimates suggest that the market for GES was

around US$930 billion in 2012, rising to US$1.4 trillion by 2020 (ISG, 2013). Yet this influential sector

receives scant attention in the operations management literature. The paper draws on six case studies to

explore the operations management challenges of delivering GES. In doing so the paper introduces the

concept of network capabilities for GES, highlighting the centrality that: (i) network resources e

accessing and deploying dispersed resources, (ii) network coordination ecoordinating and integrating

network activities, and (iii) network learning ecollective learning and knowledge management, all play

in enabling the successful operational management of GES.

©2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Background and introduction

Professional services provide a significant research opportunity

for the Operations Management (OM) community. They are a major

plank in the modern economy and represent a “very different

context for developing OM tools and techniques (Lewis and Brown

2012:p2)”. However there is a relative dearth of in-depth explo-

ration of the specific operations challenges of professional services

(Løwendahl, 2005; Heineke and Davis, 2007; Goodale et al., 2008;

Lewis and Brown, 2012). That literature on professional service

operations management (PSOM) that does exist is largely limited to

a few classic types of professional services such as legal services

(Lewis and Brown, 2012), healthcare services (Heineke,1995) and

social services (Harvey, 1992). There is an “urgent need to move

beyond [these classic types of professional services] in order to

compare them with other categories (Von Nordenflycht

2010:p171)”; and only by doing so, we will be in a position to

possibly tease out effective organisational features for professional

services in a particular operations context.

This research focuses on a new domain of professional services

eglobal engineering services (GES). We have chosen to study the

operations management challenges of GES because they have both

traditionally been under-studied and they epitomise a significant

archetypal change that many professional service firms are facing.

In short, professional service firms are shifting from the traditional

organisational model of a professional partnership to a more

knowledge-based, technology-enabled, globally-networked orga-

nisation (Roth and Menor,20 03; Brock et al., 2007; Chase and Apte,

2007; Abdelzaher, 2012).One could argue that GES firms are at the

forefront of this organisational transformation. They are pioneering

new forms of network based organisations as a result of the nature

of the knowledge they deploy, the degree of jurisdictional control

they exercise, and the global client relationships they seek

(Malhotra and Morris, 2009; Zhang et al., 2014). From a knowledge

perspective, GES firms tend to adopt lateral team structures and

reciprocal processes since they have a technical or syncretic

knowledge base supported by multiple disciplines rather than a

normative knowledge base. From a jurisdiction perspective, engi-

neering professions have weaker social closure and looser

geographic jurisdictional boundaries; therefore it is relatively easy

for GES firms to form a global network structure. From a client

perspective, GES require a high degree of face-to-face client inter-

action in the production process, and thus a high degree of

geographic dispersion of assets especially when their clients are

geographically dispersed.

In parallel with other professional services firms, it is clear that

network organisations play an increasingly important role in GES.

Key driving forces include the expansion of large, multi-national

engineering services firms, increasing geographic dispersion of

engineering capabilities (including the human capabilities

*Corresponding author.

E-mail address: zhangys@bham.ac.uk (Y. Zhang).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.03.006

0272-6963/©2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Journal of Operations Management 42-43 (2016) 80e94