Optimal service design
Schön, Cornelia
Document Type:
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Habilitation thesis
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Year of publication:
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2008
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Place of publication:
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Karlsruhe
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University:
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Universität Karlsruhe
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Publication language:
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English
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Institution:
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Business School > Service Operations Management (Schön 2014-)
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Subject:
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330 Economics 650 Management
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Abstract:
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Services are the largest and fastest growing sector of developed economies. In Germany, more than 70 percent of the labor force is working in the service sector; similarly, around 70 percent of the gross value added are generated by services (Statistisches Bundesamt (2007)). Also, manufacturers increasingly differentiate their products through value-added services as products mature and become commodity-like. However, despite these developments, productivity growth in services continuously lags behind manufacturing. One reason for this may be that services pose particular challenges to managers due to their intangible and experiential nature, perishability, possibly high levels of customer involvement, and finally their high interdependence of marketing and operations decisions. For services, “process is the product” and the customer often participates in the service delivery process as an external input factor. Accordingly, managing services requires tight integration between operations, strategy, marketing, technology, and organizational issues from an integrated viewpoint with a focus on the customer.
Despite the common agreement regarding the importance of service management, it is also widely recognized that research in this area lags behind, especially relative to manufacturing (Roth and Menor (2003)), and in particular in the area of service design. Approaches from production management can hardly be adapted directly without modifications or may even be not applicable at all. Describing a generic service organization and its planning tasks is more complicated than in manufacturing and templates can only be developed based on a reasonable service classification. While supply chain management and advanced planning systems are well established in production management nowadays and allow the integrated management support by operations research (OR) methods, again, the development in the service area falls behind. Planning a service organization may often face many different problems at the interface of various traditional decision making functions.
The contribution of this work is to (1) provide an overview of the current state of the art in service management, (2) identify the major gaps and the potential for decision support especially with respect to an integrated quantitative service design approach, and (3) provide a systematic framework as well as particular profit-oriented models to fill these gaps. In particular, we will develop and implement customer-centric service design optimization models for mass service industries (e.g. airlines), service shops (e.g. retailing) and professional service providers (e.g. project-based consulting services).
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| Dieser Datensatz wurde nicht während einer Tätigkeit an der Universität Mannheim veröffentlicht, dies ist eine Externe Publikation. |
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