Page 12 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Unit 1: Service Operation Management

Notes
Table 1.1: Stage one — Service Awakening

Operations
Nature of Focus of
Stage Outcomes Management
Research Research
Issues
ONE Descriptive Goods v/s services growing
Services are different awareness of the
importance of
service, customer
operations and
customer contact

We also witnessed the first “challenge” papers on service operations research; “The service
sector: challenges and imperatives for research in operations management” and “Service
operations management: research and application”.
The main characteristic of stage two was that the study of service appeared to have broken free
from its product-based roots. There was also recognition of, and reference to, the research
undertaken in the other disciplines undertaking service research.

The epitome of this era was the well-regarded paper by Parasuraman, “A conceptual model of
service quality and its implications for future research”. This was a major step in the
development of the cross-functional subject of service management. Service quality was a
topic which was seen as important by all of the different functional areas and where they could
all make a contribution. This landmark article (and subsequent studies by the authors) not
only stimulated a huge amount of activity in the marketing area but threw down the gauntlet
to the operations area, as it was realized that other functional areas had important things to
say about a topic which had traditionally been seen as “operations”. It was also a different
approach to quality, in stark contrast to the Statistical Process Control (SPC) approach. This
was also the case when Shostack’s article “Designing services that deliver” was seized upon by
marketers as they moved into process mapping, previously a cornerstone of operations
management.
Interest in internally-focused service operations did not cease, however.
There was also recognition of cross-functional issues in papers such as “The employee as
customer” and in a text by Eiglier and Langeard Servuction which combined aspects of marketing
and production, though the text is subtitled “Le marketing des services”. We also witnessed the
production of what might be regarded as the first service management text. The service
management area was also gaining some degree of respectability with the publication of two
journals; The Service Industries Journal in 1980 and the Journal of Professional Services Marketing in
1985.

For operations this was a period when the nature of service and service operations was classified
as a prelude to the development of tools and concepts. The dimensions included customer
contact time, degree of customisation, the amount of judgment exercised by front office staff,
whether the value was added in the front or back office, the operation’s product or process focus
(Johnston and Morris, 1985). These discussions resulted in the now widely-accepted categorisation
of service operations; mass, professional and service shop.

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