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Services Management

Notes junkie”. In it he provides some tell-tale signs of the service operations “junkie” which might
sound uncomfortably familiar to many service operations academics:

You ask the resort hotel manager if you could peek at the reservation system while you
are on vacation rather than spending an afternoon on the beach.

You go out of your way to visit theme parks in Korea just to benchmark them against
Disney land.

You are more interested in the planes and taxis you took to get to the factory tour than you
are in the factory.

You provide unsolicited feedback to your dentist on how the scheduling and appointments
system could be improved.
A couple more are added here:

Your partner is reluctant to be taken to a restaurant to celebrate your wedding
anniversary in case something goes wrong.

Your children will only go with you to the theme park if you promise not to debrief
them on the way home.
This growing and compelling interest in service was happening in many parts of the world and
in different functional areas (Brown et al., 1994; Gronroos, 1994; Johnston, 1994; Schneider, 1994).
In marketing, accounting and HRM for example, academics were waking up to their service-
based students. There was growing concern about the product-based nature of their material.
Marketing seemed preoccupied with the marketing of white goods. Accountancy academics
used examples which were based around an imaginary product, the “widget”. Ironically, this
has become the accepted name for a beer can insert which forces gas into the beer when the can
is opened, in order to provide a creamy head. (No doubt the majority of OM academics will have
opened up a can to have a look!) Thus the service management movement was born in many
different disciplines by people united by a shared enthusiasm and interest for all things intangible.
From these early beginnings, a large-scale, worldwide movement gained pace and
membership. Over the last ten to 20 years this has had a profound effect on research and
teaching. The service operations movement, like the service marketing movement, has
been characterised by a number of stages; an initial realisation of the difference between
goods and service, the development of conceptual frameworks and the empirical testing of
these frameworks. We are now entering a fourth stage concerned with the application of the
tools and frameworks to improve service management. As the service movement has grown,
with increasing overlap between the subjects of operations, marketing and HRM for example,
this fourth stage is also characterised by a “return to roots”, a realisation that we might have
lost, or inadvertently ignored, the strength of our core disciplines and the need to bring a
sense of academic rigor and depth to the developing subject of service management.

The next sections briefly chart the development of operations through the first three
stages and lay out the challenges as we enter this fourth stage in the development of
service operations management. Several areas for future research are discussed.

Note Service management is integrated into supply chain management as the intersection
between actual sales and the customers.

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