Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and highlight that the application of leagility can be possible in mass services as one type of services.

This paper describes a case study and considers the concept of the leagility in a mass service organization. By highlighting some of the characteristics of mass services, it examines whether or not this concept can be applicable in the context of mass services.

Despite the low customization in mass services, fast food restaurants have faced changing needs of the customers. To respond to these demands, the case study organization can adopt new strategies so that it could be able to serve the customer with short lead times, low costs and high variety.

This paper considers leagility in a single mass service. Hence, in order to provide robust results in this type of services, more cases should be studied. It is also necessary to study leagility in other types of services that is, professional services and service shops.

Despite the importance of mass services in today's life, research have focused on the application of operations management's concepts in manufacturing sector. This paper has proposed the possibility of applying the leagility concept in a case study organization to show that mass services can benefit from the advantages of both lean and agile paradigms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide services marketers with a deeper understanding of the elements that characterize mass services. The paper shows that many studies have been conducted within the context of professional and retail services, knowledge of mass service contexts is limited despite the growth of services within this context.

This paper provides a conceptual overview of mass services and develops a typology for mass services based on an extensive review of the services literature. Specifically, the typology developed classifies mass services on the basis of service delivery and purpose. The typology forwarded, therefore, classifies mass services using a two‐by‐two framework with individual and collective mass services classified as either utilitarian or hedonic in nature.

The typology found in this paper provides a practical insight into the characteristics of services falling into the classification of mass services. The value of the classification is that managers can better understand the unique aspects of mass services, thus, allowing for a better utilization of limited resources. Moreover, the paper provides insights into a service classification that has received limited research emphasis, yet, is attracting increasing industry attention.

This paper provides academics and practitioners with a framework that has both tactical and strategic implications. These implications include enhancing the customer experience and thus customer retention, resource management, employee training and service management. Given that such a framework has not been forwarded in the literature, the typology presented in the current paper makes an original contribution to the literature.

Many innovative companies are experimenting with a strategy of mass customization—the low‐cost production of high variety, even individually customized goods and services. Based on his experiences at IBM and research into mass customization conducted at MIT and at the IBM Consulting Group, the author has identified five basic methods for mass customizing products and services.

Focuses on the commonly cited marketing problems that arise from the special characteristics of services. Empirically tests for the differing impact of these problems among service organizations, by assessing marketing managers’ perceptions about the problems that their organizations face. Results suggest that managers from three main service typologies (based on Silvestro et al’s 1992 classification scheme) do perceive differences in the degree of impact the problems have on their organizations. The findings and their strategic implications for marketing managers are discussed, along with limitations and future areas of research.

This paper explores differences in the implementation of total quality management (TQM) in different types of service process, using a typology which distinguishes between services positioned along the continua of volume and variety. A case‐study‐based analysis of the implementation of six core TQM precepts was conducted to explore differences in implementation between professional (low volume, customised) services, mass (high volume, standardised) services and service shops (positioned midway on the continua). The study revealed some significant differences in the maturity of TQM implementation in the different types of service. The results suggest that mass services are conducive to the implementation of quality measurement, SPC and preventative approaches to quality improvement. However, professional services are more conducive to the cultural managerial changes associated with TQM. Interestingly, whilst it was hypothesised that TQM practices would be most readily transferable to mass services, the results suggested that the service shop was the most conducive environment for TQM implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze standard setting and how a critical mass of users emerged in an industry in which multiple interface standards co‐exist and a critical mass of users was created multiple times.

This paper is based on research conducted for almost ten years using the case study approach. Data were gathered through more than 100 interviews with Japanese firms and through analyses of published sources.

The paper finds that growth in mobile internet services required agreements on multiple interface standards where some of these interface standards exhibited interdependencies and thus required integral design, while others have been built on top of these “basic” interface standards. Agreements on the former interface standards enable basic data connections between phones, services, and content and this required integral design. The latter interface standards connect the mobile phone with content and applications from other industries (e.g. music, video, publishing, broadcasting, and payment) and each critical mass of phones, services, and content for them partly builds from previously created critical masses.

The research focused on a single industry in a single country.

This paper helps scholars and practitioners better understand how interface standards and critical masses for them emerge.

This is the first paper to analyze multiple interface standards in a single industry and the emergence of a critical mass of users or complementary products for these standards.

To maintain auditor independence, Section 201 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) imposes restrictions on audit firms in rendering management advisory services (MASs) to audit clients. Responding to the requirement, audit firms establish a strategic alliance with consulting companies to expand their scope of services to alleviate the impairment of auditor independence. Taiwan follows the spirit of SOX in related laws and regulations. To investigate the effects of SOX on Taiwanese auditing industry, this study aims to examine the relationship between MASs and operating performance of audit firms.

This study obtains empirical data from the 1989–2017 Survey Report of Audit Firms in Taiwan, published by the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC). FSC administers the survey across all registered audit firms annually to collect business information on the auditing industry for macro-economic analysis and industrial policy development. The authors group audit firms into three categories: national, regional and local firms. Based on the structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) theoretical framework, this study establishes the following cross-sectional regression equation to test the authors’ hypotheses.

Main results indicate that national firms have better post-SOX firm and alliance performance. Both firm and alliance MASs contribute more to the performance of national firms after SOX.

This study claims that national firms establish alliance with consulting companies for resource sharing but regional and local firms for tax-saving.

Consistent with the economic theory of regulation and resource-based theory, SOX matters in Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to find ways to develop more efficient mass transit systems across the USA and, thus, make the best use of state/federal/municipal government funds and taxpayers’ monies. This paper conducts benchmarking studies. In doing so, this paper identifies the best-in class mass transit practices that every regional mass transit system can emulate.

The continuous underutilization of a mass transit system can increase public scrutiny concerning the increased investment in mass transit services. To defuse such scrutiny, this paper analyzes the past (in year 2011) performances of 515 mass transit agencies in the USA using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Also, to identify which factors influences those performances, the authors paired DEA scores for transit efficiency at the state level against a set of independent variables using a special form of regression analysis called Tobit regression.

The authors found that the greater population density of the service area, the greater number of riders can be served in a short amount of distance and time. Also, the authors discovered that the transportation mode of mass transit services could affect mass transit efficiency. On the other hand, the authors found no evidence indicating that the public ownership or private operation of transit systems could make any differences in the transit efficiency.

This paper is one of the few that assessed the performance of mass transit systems in comparison to their peers using a large-scale data and identify the leading causes of mass transit inefficiency. Thus, this paper helps transit authorities in handling juggling acts of protecting the conflicting interests of government policy makers against the general public and, then, make sensible future investment decisions.

Previously, a questionnaire survey was conducted and it was found that some management practices were more influential to service quality than others. The purpose of this paper is to identify in more detail the reasons behind the survey findings.

Eighteen in‐depth interviews into a range of management practices which support service quality were conducted.

It was found that there were difficulties in implementing some of the management practices due to the type of staff employed and to the nature of tasks undertaken.

As the purpose of this research is to facilitate interpretation of the quantitative data, the investigation did not go in detail beyond mass and technological services. Hence, individual organisational characteristics, individual circumstances, or details of the service offered to customers are not considered beyond the category of either mass or technological services.

The paper identifies that the actual contribution from different management practices to service quality varied, and explains the reasons behind the diverse contributions in each type of service business.

By introducing the mass customization service mode into the cloud logistics environment, this paper studies the joint optimization of service provider selection and customer order decoupling point (CODP) positioning based on the mass customization service mode to provide customers with more diversified and personalized service content with lower total logistics service cost.

This paper addresses the general process of service composition optimization based on the mass customization mode in a cloud logistics service environment and constructs a joint decision model for service provider selection and CODP positioning. In the model, the two objective functions of minimum service cost and most satisfactory delivery time are considered, and the Pareto optimal solution of the model is obtained via the NSGA-II algorithm. Then, a numerical case is used to verify the superiority of the service composition scheme based on the mass customization mode over the general scheme and to verify the significant impact of the scale effect coefficient on the optimal CODP location.

(1) Under the cloud logistics mode, the implementation of the logistics service mode based on mass customization can not only reduce the total cost of logistics services by means of the scale effect of massive orders on the cloud platform but also make more efficient use of a large number of logistics service providers gathered on the cloud platform to provide customers with more customized and diversified service content. (2) The scale effect coefficient directly affects the total cost of logistics services and significantly affects the location of the CODP. Therefore, before implementing the mass customization logistics service mode, the most reasonable clustering of orders on the cloud logistics platform is very important for the follow-up service combination.

The originality of this paper includes two aspects. One is to introduce the mass customization mode in the cloud logistics service environment for the first time and summarize the operation process of implementing the mass customization mode in the cloud logistics environment. Second, in order to solve the joint decision optimization model of provider selection and CODP positioning, this paper designs a method for solving a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model using a multi-layer coding genetic algorithm.