This international market-leading book, aimed at both students and practising managers, provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to service operations management. Building on the basic principles of operations management, the authors examine the operations decisions that managers face in controlling their resources and delivering services to their customers.

Organizations of all types are consistently working on new initiatives, product lines, and workflows as a way to remain competitive in the modern business environment. No matter the type of project at hand, employing the best methods for effective execution and timely completion of the task is essential to business success. Operations and Service Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a comprehensive reference source for the latest research on business operations and production processes. It examines the need for a customer focus and highlights a range of pertinent topics such as financial performance measures, human resource development, and business analytics, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for managers, professionals, students, researchers, and academics interested in operations and service management.

The purpose of this book is to provide cutting-edge information on service management such as the role services play in an economy, service strategy, ethical issues in services and service supply chains. It also covers basic topics of operations management including linear and goal programming, project management, inventory management and forecasting.This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to services and operational management challenges; it draws upon the theory and practice in many fields of study such as economics, management science, statistics, psychology, sociology, ethics and technology, to name a few. It contains chapters most textbooks do not include, such as ethics, management of public and non-profit service organizations, productivity and measurement of performance, routing and scheduling of service vehicles.An Instructor's Solutions Manual is available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to [email protected].

Balancing conceptual and applied coverage of all aspects of the management and operation of services, Service Management has maintained the position as market leader through five previous editions. It is the most comprehensive and widely used introduction to service operations on the market, written by one of the top authorities on the subject, and it is designed to develop students' skills in both strategic and operational issues pertaining to services. New material on Professional Service Firms highlights IBM’s initiative to establish a Service Science, Management, and Engineering discipline. The Sixth Edition also offers the latest information on Six-Sigma and RFID, as well as recent developments in other important industry topics. Text coverage spans both qualitative and quantitative aspects of service management and offers flexibility in courses, offering varying approaches to the study of service operations. The ancillary package includes student CD-ROM and Website that includes self-test quizzes, video clips, ServiceModel Software, and the Mortgage Service Game.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

How do policy makers and managers square the circle of increasing demand and expectations for the delivery and quality of services against a backdrop of reduced public funding from government and philanthropists? Leaders, executives and managers are increasingly focusing on service operations improvement. In terms of research, public services are immature within the discipline of operations management, and existing knowledge is limited to government departments and large bureaucratic institutions. Drawing on a range of theory and frameworks, this book develops the research agenda, and knowledge and understanding in public service operations management, addressing the most pressing dilemmas faced by leaders, executives and operations managers in the public services environment. It offers a new empirical analysis of the impact of contextual factors, including the migration of planning systems founded on MRP/ERP and the adoption of industrial based improvement practices such as TQM, lean thinking and Six Sigma. This will be of interest to researchers, educators and advanced students in public management, service operations management, health service management and public policy studies.