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Managing service operations has continued to assume greater importance in most developed economies. This is in view of the ubiquity of service organizations and operations, the associated large workforce, and the substantial contribution of the service sector to the gross domestic product of most of these countries. In order to be successful, it is extremely important for service managers to be able to appraise their activities over time by using pertinent information derived from their customers. This paper demonstrates the use of the importance‐performance analysis framework to assist management of a campus food service organization to improve its services. It also studies the relative effects of implicit and explicit weighting methods on importance ranking as well as the grid‐classification of service quality attributes. Furthermore, analysis of the factor structure of the attributes indicates, like some other reported studies, that the five‐dimensional factor structure postulated for services in the literature was not confirmed for the campus food service scenario studied.

In operations and supply chain management, time is largely one-dimensional – less is better – with much effort devoted to compressing, efficiently using, and competitively exploiting clock-time. However, by drawing on other literatures, the purpose of this paper is to understand implications for the field of operations management if we also emphasize how humans and organizations experience time, termed process-time, which is chronicled by events and stages of change.

After a brief review, the limitations of the recurrent time-oriented themes in operations management and the resulting short-termism are summarized. Next, sustainability is offered as an important starting point to explore the concept of temporality, including both clock- and process-time, as well as the implications of temporal orientation and temporal conflict in supply chains.

A framework that includes both management and stakeholder behavior is offered to illustrate how multiple temporal perspectives might be leveraged as a basis for an expanded and enriched understanding of more sustainable competitiveness in operations.

Research by others emphasizes the importance of stakeholders to competitiveness. By recognizing that different stakeholder groups have varying temporal orientations and temporality, managers can establish objectives and systems that better reflect time-based diversity and diffuse temporal conflict.

This paper summarizes how time has been incorporated in operations management, as well as the challenges of short-termism. Sustainability forms the basis for exploring multiple perspectives of time and three key constructs: temporal orientation, temporality, and temporal conflict. A framework is proposed to better incorporate temporal perspectives as a basis for competitiveness in operations and supply chain management.