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The debate about whether any difference exists between manufacturing and service operations is discussed. There is no difference per se between the two types of operation and that debate about differences between them is spurious. There are significant differences between operating systems which process materials and those which deal directly with customers. These differences are sufficient to require different treatment for material processing operations and customer processing operations. The similarities and differences between the two types of system are demonstrated, and strategies for managing customer processing operations are outlined. If an appropriate strategy is adopted, customer processing operations are very similar to material processing operations, but other strategies exist which make customer processing operations very different from material processing operations.

Service delivery requires the reception and processing of customer information. To deliver a service that satisfies customers, service job design should consider information needed to complete service delivery tasks. The objective here is to determine if the quantity of customer information received by a service delivery process has implications for service job design.

In servitization research, there has been a call to move further toward the development of business models based on a service approach. This article aims to answer this call by adopting service logic (SL) and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a service-centric business model called servification, defined as the process of identifying and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a business model based on SL.

This article is conceptual and extends servitization in the direction of service-centric business model innovation by drawing on and extending SL.

The article defines service as a higher-order concept according to SL and develops the concept of a helping strategy as the foundation for a service-based business model. Further, it develops a typology of organizational resources and processes that must be developed for the emergence of such a business model.

Since this article is the first to conceptually develop servification, more both theoretical and empirical research is naturally required. The development of servification takes servitization in the direction of service-based business model innovation and also contributes to the research on SL.

Servification enables the development of service-centric strategies and organizational resources and processes and service-based business models.

This article is the first to adopt SL in studies of business model innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the interrelationship between process recovery, employee recovery and customer recovery in a financial services call centre. The authors also investigate how process recovery affects customer recovery via employees – the bridge between organisation and customers.

A case study–based approach is adopted in this study, and data triangulation is achieved through multiple data collection methods including semi-structured interviews, employees’ survey and company reports. Justice theory is the theoretical lens considered to understand the “service recovery (SR)” phenomenon.

This paper helps in understanding the relationship of process and employee recovery with customer recovery. Findings suggest that SR could be used for complaint management as well as in understanding and addressing the gaps in internal operations and employee skill sets. Factors such as training, operating systems, empowerment, incentives, and feedback were identified as critical in providing effective SR. Process improvement is necessary to control complaints by conducting root cause analysis and learning from failure.

Findings are limited to a case company in financial services sector and thus limit its generalisability to other context. Questionnaire distributed to employees only included important dimensions of SR, which would be further developed in future research.

This paper explores the specific reverse exchange strategies, termed in this paper as SR, and analyses the different factors responsible for better performance in the exchange process. The paper highlights how the imbalance in the process and employee recovery dimensions can impact on customer recovery. Closing the customer complaint loop by using the SR perspective may help organisation to not only deal with complaints in a better way but also prevent such complaints in the future.

This paper aims to identify a manufacturer’s abilities to develop, build, sell and deliver Internet of Things (IoT) services.

This paper is a qualitative comparative case method that uses multiple sources of data, including executive interviews and secondary data, to understand a manufacturer’s IoT capabilities.

Five strategic IoT capabilities were identified: digital business model development, scalable solution platform building, value selling, value delivery and business intelligence and measurement.

The main limitations are related to the qualitative research method applied. The results are applicable mainly to relatively large and global manufacturers.

Managers responsible for solution business development can apply the developed model to acquire and manage IoT specific resources, processes and capabilities.

Existing studies have not addressed the IoT-specific resources, processes and capabilities that manufacturers’ possess. This is one of the first studies to conceptualize how these capabilities are used.

The proliferation of customer-related data provides companies with numerous service opportunities to create customer value. The purpose of this study is to develop a framework to use this data to provide services.

This study conducted four action research projects on the use of customer-related data for service design with industry and government. Based on these projects, a practical framework was designed, applied, and validated, and was further refined by analyzing relevant service cases and incorporating the service and operations management literature.

The proposed customer process management (CPM) framework suggests steps a service provider can take when providing information to its customers to improve their processes and create more value-in-use by using data related to their processes. The applicability of this framework is illustrated using real examples from the action research projects and relevant literature.

“Using data to advance service” is a critical and timely research topic in the service literature. This study develops an original, specific framework for a company’s use of customer-related data to advance its services and create customer value. Moreover, the four projects with industry and government are early CPM case studies with real data.

Customer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs. With most existing approaches to business process (re-)design focusing on process efficiency, customers are often treated as second-class citizens. Despite emergent research on customer process management, there is a lack of guidance on how to design customer-centric business processes.

The authors conducted a structured literature review and analyzed companies awarded for outstanding customer centricity to compile design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. The authors iteratively validated and refined these heuristics with experts from academia and industry. Finally, the heuristics was grouped according to their expected impact on interaction capabilities to enable their prioritization in specific settings.

The authors proposed 15 expert-approved and literature-backed design heuristics for customer-centric business processes together with real-world examples. The heuristics aim at increasing customer satisfaction with interaction-intensive core processes, which is an important driver of corporate success.

The design heuristics complement existing efficiency-centered (re-)design heuristics. They reflect cognitive shortcuts that support process analysts in the generation of innovative ideas during process (re-)design. The heuristics also add to customer process management and help put customer centricity into practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a model of different aspects of ISO 9000 implementation in terms of their relationships with three key supply chain (SC) management practices (internal processes, supplier relationships, and customer relationships). In addition, it aims to examine the relationship between the three key SC activities and operational performance.

Data were collected from 321 middle and senior managers of ISO 9001 certified firms in Australia who were responsible for managing the quality systems in their organizations. The structural equation modelling (SEM) technique was employed using LISREL software to test the research model and the hypotheses in this study.

The results show that advanced implementation of ISO 9000 is positively related to all three aspects of SC activities (internal, customer, and supplier process management), while supportive implementation is positively related to internal and customer process management. However, basic implementation has no direct influence on any SC management practices. The results also indicate that supplier and internal process management both have a positive effect on operational performance, while customer process management has no significant impact on operational performance.

The results provide key insights for managers on the extent to which different aspects of the implementation of a quality management system would produce benefits for the organization within the SC context.

Despite the central premises of ISO 9000, which are concerned with internal processes and SC management practices, only a few studies have examined this matter to date. The current study seeks to bridge this gap by examining the effect of ISO 9000 implementation on operational and SC management practices that, in turn, will predict the operational benefits within adopting firms.