Another finding was that the theory and practice of “operations management” had
many similarities with councils’ waste services and the importance of linking
operations directly to strategy (Fowler, 1998). In terms of this research programme,
Bourne et al. (1998) highlighted how performance management could be critical in
terms of establishing what an organisation was seeking to improve. Typically, this
started with “what types of measures should (we) use?”, but Bourne et al. (1998),
emphasised this would not properly inform the development of a framework which
was needed in order to provide a structure within which measures could be embedded
and operationalised. Using three manufacturing case studies, Bourne et al. (1998), drew
a number of relevant conclusions for this research programme: