Ochieng Okoth’s scientific contributions

Operational excellence can lead to customer satisfaction, which can help improve the profitability of a company. The main purpose of the study is to determine how the company can improve customer satisfaction through incorporating three basic principles of operational excellence in its operational strategy. The three operational excellence principles considered here are focus on service quality, lean methodology and Six Sigma. This research paper is in form of case study of a five star restaurant in Nairobi, Zen Garden Ltd. The research design is descriptive and cross sectional survey. The target population includes 250 customers, 115 employees and 6 directors of Zen Garden. Stratified sampling has been used to sample the target population. Data collection methods include questionnaires and observation. Quantitative methods like bar chats and pie charts have been used to analyze the data collected. A survey on SERVQUAL model was conducted to determine how focus on service quality can lead to customer satisfaction. Customers were asked to participate in the survey and service quality gaps have been identified. Recommendations on how these gaps can be filled have been given. Secondly questionnaires on 5s were given to employees of Zen Garden to determine how lean methodology can lead to customer satisfaction. Finally questionnaires were given to directors to determine the extent to which six sigma is being used at Zen and how it can lead to customer satisfaction. In order to implement the operational strategy, the critical success factors to achieve operational excellence have been identified by use of questionnaires to directors.

The two organisations in this study were chosen to investigate the relation between knowledge management and competitive advantage. Safaricom has knowledge management systems while organisation B has no knowledge management systems but has a task force which has a wealth of experience since the organisation was one of the first telecommunication companies to be established in Kenya. These two organizations were compared all factors held constant to find out if knowledge management can lead to competitive advantage. Secondary data was also used which determined that safaricom had a competitive edge over Organization B and the purpose of this study was to establish if knowledge management is a contributor of this fact. The target population was all the employees in the two organizations. Since the population was all the employees in the organization stratified random sampling was used to get the sample size the strata were the two organisations and a sample of employees was randomly selected in each organisation. Quantitative research technique was applied and instruments such as questionnaires were used to collect data. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was also used to process and analyse data. The key findings proved that knowledge management is key in maintaining competitive advantage.