Improving the service quality at Trujillo city council registry office

This operations management case is set in Spain, where a time-honored but inefficient system of "registries" exist in all municipalities. All correspondence between citizens and the various agencies of city government are supposed to go through the "registro", which, in turn, is supposed to distribute inquiries and requests to the appropriate department. When a new director is named to head the registry in the city of Trujillo (a disguised name), he finds an office with long and confusing lines, demoralized employees, and a hit-or-miss system for getting correspondence to municipal departments in a timely fashion. With little guidance form the City Council which has hired him, clear resistance to change from long-time registro employees, and no clear sense of exactly how operations are currently structured, Lopez must decide how to begin improvements. The case calls on students both to engage core operations management issues -- such as the development of "process flow" charts -- and vision/mission questions. Is it enough to improve the efficiency of the Registry? Or is it a department which has outlived its purpose and needs radical change? Is such change a practical possibility? Distributed by permission of the Escuela Secondaria de Administracion de Empresas (ESADE), Barcelona, Spain.