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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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