A Logistic Process Immaturity Model Proposal

The creation of value through the availability of goods and services is the main added value of the logistics activities in any company (Hofmann and Rüsch, 2017). This area allows the flow of information and resources both inside and outside organizations, making the operation of companies possible. Hence, there is a need to study, manage, improve, and optimize business logistics processes (Battista and Schiraldi, 2013) and thus ensure the efficient operation of the company’s operations.

It is possible through the analysis and improvement of logistics and supply chain processes in general, to positively impact company’s overall performance (Garcia-Reyes and Giachetti, 2010). To support such process improvement, multiple studies propose numerous strategies, methodologies, tools, and techniques (Harrington, 1991). Maturity models are well-known and well-established tools used traditionally in information systems research to mainly support the management, analysis, and improvement of software development processes (Hausladen and Schosser, 2020).

The most frequently used maturity models is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) developed by the Carnegie Mellon University (Paulk, 2009). CMM establishes five levels that describe the level of development of the company, or maturity levels, in terms of the best practices associated with software development (CMMI Product Team, 2010).

However, in the case of the CMM, a large number of companies that are evaluated under this model are evaluated within the lowest levels proposed, which is misleading because they can really be much less mature than what is established in the low maturity level (Schorsch, 1996). Hence, the companies need to assess their true maturity by expanding traditional maturity models, thus evaluating their low maturity or simply immaturity (Finkelstein, 1992).

In this way, immaturity models are coined as an extension to maturity models, both CMM and others used from the literature. These immaturity models are presented simply as the inferior or negative part of the maturity models and seek to describe and calculate the level of criticality of the processes of the company and the company itself (Piney, 2009), which traditional maturity models fail to assess.

The efforts made so far to assess the immaturity of processes have not been clearly documented or documented as parody or joke (Finkelstein, 1992) besides being limited in content and quantity.

This work seeks to define clearly and seriously an immaturity model for the assessment of logistic processes mainly in manufacturing companies.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows.

Section 2 introduces the traditional maturity models, so that it is possible to give a context and understand the immaturity model proposal.

Section 3 mentions works found in a literature review, which mention the immaturity of processes or the use of immaturity models.

Section 4 presents the proposal of a logistic immaturity model, including the processes, characteristic practices, and form suggestion for its implementation.

Section 5 presents a case study in which the model is used in a real company as well as the initial perceptions of its implementation.

Finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions of this article and the direction of future research.

The first step in defining immaturity models is to understand maturity models, their origin, importance, and potential. Maturity models are organizational maps that represent a simplified view of the reality of a process or an organization for their analysis and assessment through the so-called maturity levels (Enke, et al., 2017). This assessment aims to improve the current state of development of the object of evaluation through an improvement in its performance, in addition to allowing comparison working as well as a benchmarking tool (Enke, et al., 2017).

These types of models were originally created to support software project companies to maintain their competitive advantage, reduce operating costs, ensure product quality through process quality, and reduce the time taken for the company to reach the end customer (de Bruin, et al., 2005; Nurdiani, et al., 2019).

However, the term maturity has been used strongly since the 1980s, thanks to IBM. Subsequently, the term is reinforced and given greater importance by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) (Paulk, 2009). This term is used to express the level of development of an entity or object subject to evaluation and, together with methodologies such as the Total Quality Management (TQM) and the European Foundation Quality Management (EFQM) approach, gives rise to maturity models as such.

The greatest exponent and reference of maturity models is the CMM created by the Carnegie Mellon University, the organization responsible for managing the SEI (CMMI Product Team, 2010). It is perhaps the most worked, imitated, and studied model of all the maturity models in the world, being of great popularity and confidence for researchers from multiple areas of knowledge. At present, it has three main variants, each one focused on the focus of the company and the object of evaluation.

The first variant of the CMM focuses on the evaluation of software development processes in companies.

The second variant focuses on the processes in software companies that provide some type of service.

Finally, the last variant focuses mainly on the evaluation of the processes of acquisition of goods or services in software development companies.

In general, the maturity models including the CMM consider a five-level evaluation scale (CMMI Product Team, 2010), also called maturity levels, which seeks to give a rating to the processes according to their development (Pérez-Mergarejo, et al., 2014). However, the five-level scale to define process maturity is not a mandatory condition for maturity models; there are models with three (Meng, et al., 2011), four (Lahti, et al., 2009), six (Hausladen and Schosser, 2020), and even more levels.

Clearly, the higher the number of levels, the more precise it is to assess the maturity, sacrificing the practicality of the model. Regardless of the number of levels that the maturity model has, and whether it considers a level zero or not, they all describe positive levels of maturity.

While maturity refers to the level of development of processes (Pfleeger, 1995), immaturity refers to the setback of advances and lack of interest in process performance. The term immaturity is used in contexts in which it is referred to as a means to determine how critical a process area is (Battista, et al., 2012).

The level of criticality referred to in the term immaturity is reflected in poor performance, lack of development, constant problems, execution errors, and, obviously, the lack of maturity of the processes. From the immaturity measured as the level of criticality of the processes, hundreds of problems that can manifest in multiple ways arise, being sources even to break businesses.

Immaturity models come originally as a critic and an informal proposal complementary to the traditional maturity models. The first documented proposal of immaturity model is focused on the evaluation of characteristics beyond the chaotic in the processes of software development companies (Finkelstein, 1992). This model is presented as a necessary extension to the CMM, and although it has a certain degree of informality in the proposal and mockery, it has served as a source to develop additional proposals for both maturity and immaturity models.

Other authors without directly mentioning immaturity models as such refer to the immaturity that exists and the problems that affect the performance of traditional maturity models, such as the CMM (Bach, 1994), justifying the creation and need for extension provided by immaturity models.

Later, the evaluation of immaturity of processes is given a little more development without significantly improving the seriousness or rigor of the study (Schorsch, 1996). Previously developed approaches regarding immaturity are taken as the basis for proposing the Capability Immaturity Model (CIMM) (Schorsch, 1996).

This immaturity model proposal is a counter proposal to what is established by the CMM. The CIMM, despite not establishing a clear methodology for the assessment of immaturity, details a proposal of high interest in terms of defining the characteristics of each of the assessment levels or immaturity levels.

These two initial proposals of immaturity models subsequently serve to develop additional models for the assessment of the immaturity of business processes. One of these proposals is a model focused on the assessment of the immaturity of project management processes (Piney, 2009), differing from the previous proposals focused on the evaluation of software development processes.

In addition to defining the immaturity model framework, the project management immaturity model proposes a methodology to perform the immaturity assessment as well as a method to interpret the results. Table 1 summarizes the main, among the few existing, models of immaturity found in the literature and mentioned previously, which serve as a reference for this work.

Although each new proposal of immaturity models or in the use of the concept of immaturity is more formal than the previous one, they always have a small component of informality and lack of seriousness. A part of the objective of this work is to formalize, to a certain degree, the concept of immaturity, showing that it can be a serious and useful work, through a serious proposal and implementation of an immaturity model.

The immaturity model proposal of this article focuses on assessing the logistic processes of mainly manufacturing companies. The processes considered in the model are part of the proposal and are the most representative when defining the logistics area of a company (Battista and Schiraldi, 2013). In this way the model proposal is called the Logistic Process Immaturity Model (LPIM). The processes corresponding to the LPIM and are subject of immaturity assessment are:

Warehouse Management and Control (WMC),

The logistic processes considered are assessed on a scale of immaturity that determines and is able to generically describe their level of criticality (Battista, et al., 2012). Table 2 shows the scale used for the assessment, referred to as the immaturity levels of the model. Each of the levels in Table 2 is given a name that allows to have a quick initial idea about the critical conditions that the process has. Similarly, each process is associated with a characteristic practice that determines a generic behavior for processes at that specific level. Each level is described in greater detail below.

Considering that what would be a Level 0 in various proposals of maturity models found in the literature represent a degree of ignorance of the process (Pérez-Mergarejo, et al., 2014), the immaturity levels of the LPIM begin from a Level 1 to be consistent with several of these proposals. The conditions and description of a process in each of the immaturity levels, based on the mentioned immaturity models, are discussed in the remainder of this section.

The LPIM is tested and used in a medium-sized company in the furniture sector in the city of Medellin in Colombia. The company is classified as medium according to the Colombian norm that establishes the number of employees and the total value of the company’s assets, the parameters for this classification. For its part, the company manager was responsible for founding the company in 1993, overseeing operations since then. In addition, the manager has limited unfinished university studies, finding the company as a source of work to live.

During the time that the company has operated, the processes in general have changed little and little has been the effort to seek to improve or optimize them. Although the company has been in the market and has survived economically during its years of operation, it shows great problems at first sight, especially in the logistics area. The employees and the manager himself refer and express in their own words the critical problems that the company has. Knowing that the company has problems, it has never undergone any type of diagnosis and much less logistic analysis.

The company is contacted to request a visit in order to test the immaturity model. Considering that the model can be aggressive and acid for the company, the conditions of the assessment are explained from the beginning. Rather than being a criticism of the strategies taken by the company, the model seeks to be of help by serving as a starting point for other actions focused on improving the company, besides being a merely investigative exercise in search of experiences and knowledge on the implementation of the proposed model.

During the guided tour of the company, the processes considered in the LPIM are indicated to the manager, generating a discussion to finally reach an agreement on the immaturity level of that process. Some processes are found to not apply to any of the levels proposed by their level of development and relatively positive performance. The rest of the immaturity qualifications given to the LPIM processes are summarized in Fig. 1.

Figure 1

The plot with the results of the assessment shows that the TAL process is the most critical of all the logistic processes assessed by the LPIM in the case study company. As mentioned above, the PC and SPM processes do not apply to any of the immaturity levels, thanks to their relative level of development that does not match them with any characteristic practice of the respective immaturity levels.

According to the suggestions given previously, the company should seek to establish a team responsible for improving the TAL process, being the most critical of all. This team must have a technical component, internal support, and the manager’s constant participation to ensure the improvement in the process.

The improvement efforts made should be focused on ensuring that the process does not qualify at any of the proposed immaturity levels. Thus, the improvement spaces generated by the company are justified and taken advantage of efficiently.

Finally, the results are delivered to the company and an accompaniment is followed to improve its processes, based on the priority of criticality given by the LPIM.

Immaturity models result in a good methodology to expand traditional maturity models, which frequently fall short at their lowest levels to express the low levels of process and business development. Immaturity models require more studies and greater seriousness, so that researchers are encouraged to expand studies on this front and consequently increase their implementation. As such, the concept of immaturity and immaturity models is aimed at detecting more accurately the low development of the processes and the criticality associated with it.

The immaturity model proposal, LPIM, presents the key logistic processes to be assessed, along with the necessary levels and assessment methodology, to make it a simple, applicable, and replicable model.

The logistic processes exposed in the LPIM are usually the most representative for all manufacturing organizations. The immaturity levels are summarized, so that they are easy to understand; however, they also have enough level of detail to understand them in depth.

The proposed assessment methodology makes it an attractive methodology for the quick evaluations of business processes.

As the concept of immaturity model is not widely studied in the literature, a light model such as the one proposed encourages future research in this subject. From the case study, positive experiences in the use of LPIM are reported, helping to guide the improvement of the company’s logistics processes

Future research should focus on exploring the immaturity models in greater depth: their creation, implementation, and usefulness in the identification of the immaturity of business processes. Also, take advantage of the immaturity models approach in the logistics area, which is a great source of problems for companies.