Services Operations Management ‐ Strategy, Design and Delivery

Citation

Maguire, J. (1998), "Services Operations Management ‐ Strategy, Design and Delivery", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 525-526. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.1998.18.4.525.1

The published material to support the teaching of service operations management has followed, with one or two admirable exceptions which jumped the queue, the evolutionary pattern first used by Fisk et al. (1993) to describe the development of services marketing literature crawling out, scurrying about and walking erect. It is only in the last five or six years that textbooks with a truly distinctive approach to the subject have appeared, reflecting the rapidly‐accelerating knowledge and understanding of the subject area. Gone are the days when the addition of “service” in front of the words “operations management” and a quick reference to “intangibility” would suffice. Several of the researchers who have helped develop this knowledge have given their authority to some well‐written texts, reflecting, as one would expect, their own interests. This volume, Services Operations Management ‐ Strategy, Design and Delivery by Christine Hope and Alan Muhlemann, joins that increasing number of student texts which collate and put into perspective much of the original work.

It is clear that the book is designed primarily for the undergraduate market or for students with no formal operations management training. The detailed introductory sections of the book describe first operations management, followed by service operations and their characteristics, before giving a clear description of the role of services in the economy. From this foundation there is a section on corporate strategy, leading on to a discussion of the functional strategies and the role of operations management. This occupies 25 per cent of the book, so the student can be in no doubt about the nature of service operations management and particularly the close integration of service operations with marketing and HRM.

This framework enables the dimensions of service quality to be examined and allows the SERVQUAL studies, which have contributed so much and provoked so much investigative work, to be introduced. The chapters on service specification and design are concise and to‐the‐point, particularly in discussing the specification parameters and the “servicescape”; there are the expected sections on the more “technical” aspects such as location, layout and resource management. The performance measurement chapter re‐introduces SERVQUAL and provides a very useful critical section, examining its limitations and acknowledging the contributions of other researchers apart from Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman. There is a final chapter on HRM issues, almost an afterthought. One would have liked to have seen this section extended, especially in highlighting encounter issues during service delivery

This is a useful, stand‐alone text. It is well written in an accessible style. There are plenty of examples of operations management scattered effectively throughout the text and there are stimulating discussion questions at the end of each chapter. But there are no case studies, either as vignettes in the text or as chapter supplements. Cases may be available from several other sources now, but they should be a feature of any student text. The references at the end of each chapter are comprehensive without being intimidating in number and provide a sound mixture of the academic and the empirical.