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The article addresses the optimization of safety stock service levels for parts in a repair kit. The work was undertaken to assist a public transit entity that stores thousands of parts used to repair equipment acquired over many decades. Demand is intermittent, procurement lead times are long, and the total inventory investment is significant.

Demand exists for repair kits, and a repair cannot start until all required parts are available. The cost model includes holding cost to carry the part being modeled as well as shortage cost that consists of the holding cost to carry all other repair kit parts for the duration of the part’s lead time. The model combines deterministic and stochastic approaches by assuming a fixed ordering cycle with Poisson demand.

The results show that optimal service levels vary as a function of repair demand rate, part lead time, and cost of the part as a percentage of the total part cost for the repair kit. Optimal service levels are higher for inexpensive parts and lower for expensive parts, although the precise levels are impacted by repair demand and part lead time.

The proposed model can impact society by improving the operational performance and efficiency of public transit systems, by ensuring that home repair technicians will be prepared for repair tasks, and by reducing the environmental impact of electronic waste consistent with the right-to-repair movement.

The optimization model is unique because (1) it quantifies shortage cost as the cost of unnecessary holding other parts in the repair kit during the shortage time, and (2) it determines a unique service level for each part in a repair kit bases on its lead time, its unit cost, and the total cost of all parts in the repair kit. Results will be counter-intuitive for many inventory managers who would assume that more critical parts should have higher service levels.

This article evaluates how consumer expectations evolve over time and if three antecedents (negative experiences, alternative attractiveness and level of visitation) explain possible changes in expectations.

A conceptual model is structured with six hypotheses that are tested through articulated studies. First, a study with a longitudinal approach is developed and applied to a sample of students. Data collection is carried out over three periods and a latent growth model (LGM) is applied. Further ahead, another essay is developed to reexamine the moderating role of corporate image and level of visitation on the effect of negative experiences on expectations. For this, the role-playing approach is applied.

Study 1 reveals that patterns of expectations change from one service meeting to another, and these mutations are influenced by negative experiences and alternative attractiveness. Three pieces of evidence are highlighted. First, negative experiences produce contradictory and simultaneous movements in consumer expectations. Negative experiences reduce desired expectations and, at the same time, increase adequate expectations. These effects change in magnitude because of the corporate image. This confirms the moderating role of the corporate image in the relationship between negative experiences and expectations. This does not happen with the level of visitation, in which the moderating function is not sustained. The findings about moderating effects are confirmed by Study 2. Second, as customers have alternative companies, the minimum level of expectation rises. Alternative attractiveness positively impacts only adequate expectations. Third, the results do not support the relationship between the level of visitation and expectations. This reveals that more frequent customers do not necessarily have higher expectations.

This paper is the first to provide empirical results about the moderating effects of corporate image and level of visitation on the relationship between negative experiences and expectations.

Following the continued development of transformative service research and the prevalence of the service-dominant logic in services marketing literature, increased scholarly interest centers on the co-creation of service actors’ well-being. In light of this significant evolution in service research, this study aims to provide a systematic review and synthesis of the growing, fragmented body of literature on well-being co-creation in services.

The hybrid systematic review approach combines bibliometric and framework-based literature reviews to analyze a sample of 160 article obtained from the Web of Science database. To examine the conceptual structure of the research domain, VOSviewer is used for conducting a bibliometric coupling analysis and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Next, a content analysis is used to explore how the extant literature addresses the key concepts of service actors’ participation in co-creation, their resource integration and well-being outcomes across the micro-, meso- and macro levels of service ecosystems.

Service actors’ participation and resource integration are key theoretical concepts for understanding well-being co-creation. Yet, a comprehensive overview of well-being co-creation across the different levels of service ecosystems is lacking due to the presence of various application contexts, levels of aggregation, theoretical backgrounds and methodological perspectives. A conceptual framework of well-being co-creation in service ecosystems is developed, highlighting the participation of multilevel service actors and suggesting priorities for further research.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper represents a first effort to systematically review and organize growing literature on well-being co-creation in service ecosystems.

Scholars studying servitization argue that manufacturers moving into services need to develop new job roles or modify existing ones, which must be enacted by employees with the right mentality, skill sets, attitudes and capabilities. However, there is a paucity of empirical research on how such changes affect employee-level outcomes.

The authors theorize that job enrichment and role stress act as countervailing forces during the manufacturer's service transition, with implications for employee satisfaction. The authors test the hypotheses using a sample of 21,869 employees from 201 American manufacturers that declared revenues from services over a 10-year period.

The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the firm's level of service infusion and individual employee satisfaction, which is flatter for front-end staff. This relationship differs in shape and/or magnitude between firms, highlighting the role of unobserved firm-level idiosyncratic factors.

Servitized manufacturers, especially those in the later stage of their transition (i.e. when services start to account for more than 50% of annual revenues), should try to ameliorate their employees' role-induced stress to counter a drop in satisfaction.

This is one of the first studies to examine systematically the relationship between servitization and individual employee satisfaction. It shows that back-end employees in manufacturing firms are considerably affected by an increasing emphasis on services, while past literature has almost exclusively been concerned with front-end staff.

This study aims to investigate the basic public service level in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region under the impact of COVID-19.

This study constructed a basic public service-level evaluation system from the five dimensions of education, culture, health, social security and infrastructure and environment, and measures the basic public service level in 13 cities in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei using the entropy method. The spatial pattern and dynamic evolution of the public service level are analysed from the perspective of dynamic trends in time series and spatial distribution, along with the reasons for the evolution of spatial distribution.

(1) The basic public service level in the 13 cities is generally on the rise, but the trend is unstable. (2) The basic public service level in space shows a general trend of attenuation from northeast to southwest, with significant spatial imbalance and orientation. (3) The regional differences first increase and then decrease. (4) The inter-group mobility of different basic public service levels is low, and cities with lower initial levels find it difficult to achieve leapfrog development. Moreover, the health service level of the region is still at a low stage, which is not conducive to effectively preventing and controlling the epidemic.

From the perspective of this research, the spatial pattern and dynamic evolution of basic public service were adopted to analyse the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Furthermore, this study discusses how to improve the basic public service level to ensure sustainable operation in the region under the impact of COVID-19.

Emerging transformative service research (TSR) studies adopt a service system lens to conceptualise well-being across the micro, meso and macro levels of aggregation, typically within an organisation. No TSR has yet examined well-being across multiple interconnected organisations at the highest level of aggregation, the meta or service ecosystem level. This study aims to explore how value co-creation and, critically, co-destruction among different actors across interacting organisations enhances or destroys multiple levels of well-being.

This study uses semi-structured, in-depth interviews to collect data from five types of key actors (n = 35): players, team owners, tournament operations managers, casters and viewers, across 29 interconnected organisations in the oceanic esports industry. The interviews were coded using NVivo 12 and thematically analysed.

Resource integration on each level of aggregation within a service ecosystem (micro, meso, macro and meta) can co-create and co-destroy value, which leads to the enhancement and destruction of multiple levels of well-being (individual, collective, service system and service ecosystem). Value co-creation and co-destruction, as well as the resultant well-being outcomes, were interconnected across the different levels within the service ecosystem.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to incorporate a multi-actor perspective on the well-being consequences of value co-creation and value co-destruction within a service ecosystem as opposed to service system. Thus, this research also contributes to the minimal research which examines the outcomes of value co-destruction, rather than value co-creation, at multiple levels of aggregation.

With the vigorous development of the e-commerce delivery service industry, delivery service has become an important factor for e-tailers to obtain the market competitive advantage. However, how to choose the best delivery service strategy is a difficult problem for e-tailers in practice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of delivery service on e-tailers and online platforms.

Based on the Stackelberg game, the research study establishes and solves three models, namely dual self-supporting delivery service model, dual third-party delivery service model and differential delivery service model.

The results show that when the self-supporting and third-party delivery cost coefficients are all small, no matter which delivery service providers the competitor selects, the e-tailer selects delivery with a lower service fee. When the self-supporting and third-party delivery service fee are all low, no matter which delivery service providers the competitor selects, the e-tailer selects delivery with a smaller service cost. Both service fee and service cost determine the choice of e-tailers' delivery strategy. When the commission rate is moderate, both e-tailers are willing to choose the self-supporting delivery strategy, but the platform only prefers to provide self-supporting delivery to them with a lower delivery service sensitivity coefficient.

This paper analyzes the optimal delivery service strategies for e-tailers to compete with competitors, and explores the impacts of parameters for e-tailers and online platforms in their decision-making. The findings provide valuable implications for relevant practices.

Innovation for service contributes to service quality and customer satisfaction, and further benefits service-centered organizations to sustain competitive advantages. However, concurrent mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying innovation for service at both the group and individual levels have been scarcely investigated. The purpose of this study is to explore multilevel mediating and moderating mechanisms behind the relationship between dual-level transformational leadership (TFL) and innovation for service at the group and individual levels.

Data were collected from two countries (i.e. China and Australia). Multilevel structural equation modeling was employed to validate the research model. Bootstrapping with 5,000 replications and latent moderated structural equation modeling were used to respectively examine the mediating and moderating mechanisms.

The cross-national results showed that task interdependence and creative role identity respectively played as the group-level and individual-level mediating roles between TFL and innovation for service. It was also found that task interdependence played as a cross-level predictor enhancing individual innovation for service. Task interdependence was a moderator on the relationship between individual-level TFL and creative role identity among Australian employees, but not among Chinese employees. The relationship between creative role identity and individual innovation for service was not moderated by task interdependence among both Chinese and Australian employees.

This study contributes to advancing the TFL–innovation research through revealing dual-level TFL as the antecedent of innovation for service at both the group and individual levels. It also extends the understandings of the mediating and moderating mechanisms behind this dual-level relationship between TFL and innovation for service.

This study aims to examine the applicability of Hartmann et al.’s (2018) service ecosystem framework to the day-to-day management of the modern sales force. The authors provide a review of the framework, acknowledging its strengths, while also indicating areas for advancement. The authors conclude with recommendations to the framework and indicate opportunities where future research could advance sales theory.

A review of the theoretical underpinnings of the service ecosystem framework is weighed against the established roles and responsibilities of the modern sales force in the literature.

The ability of the framework to capture the multi-level, multi-actor and dynamic aspects of sales represents an improvement in the conceptualization of selling is critical. Suggestions around the refinement for meso-level sales interactions and a more pliant application of service dominant-logic are offered.

The suggested extensions of the framework continue the advancement of novel theorization for the field of sales. Priorities for future research include consideration of ethical implications of the framework and formulations of new management strategies reflective of the broad and dynamic properties of the ecosystem conceptualization.

This paper provides managerial guidelines and implications tied specifically to the thick and thin crossing points and how they may impact employee decision-making.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to pointedly examine the service ecosystem framework with respect to established principles of managing a modern sales force.

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

The article analyses the case organisation's KM initiatives in light of the integrated care literature and recognises the tasks and requirements for effective KM when building integrated health and social care system. The empirical research material for this qualitative study consisted of the case organisation's strategy documents, the results of an external maturity assessment, KM workshop materials and publicly available documentation of the Finnish health and social care reform.

This study identifies the mechanisms by which KM can support health and social services integration. At the macro level, national coordination and regional co-operation require common information structures. At the meso level, a shared regional strategy with shared objectives guides both organisational decision-making and collaboration between professionals. At the micro level, technology supported and data-driven planning of service chains complements the experiences of professionals and may help remove obstacles to integration.

This study contributes to the literature on integrated care by providing a more comprehensive view of the role and tasks of knowledge and KM when reforming health and social services than approaches focussing solely on health informatics and internal efficiency.