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The rapid growth in volume and value of on-demand restaurant food delivery, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is causing a paradigm shift in the food service sector. However, there is a lack of hospitality management research into this emerging phenomenon. To address this gap, this paper defines and develops a novel conceptual model and typology and proposes a research agenda for ghost production in the context of food service.

This paper uses the Servuction model to explore, define and model the radical separation between food service production sites, points of sale and consumer interaction from the perspective of on-demand restaurant food delivery. A novel typology is developed and illustrated with eight industry examples from the UK and an accompanying cost benefit analysis. Future research priorities are identified.

In the hospitality literature, little attention has been paid to changes on-demand restaurant food delivery brings to production and business models of food service organisations, resulting in significant gaps between food service practice and theory. The knock-on effects to stakeholders include increased convenience for customers, uncertain employment status of riders and, for restaurants, striking a balance between capturing new markets and losing control of the customer. Additionally, for aggregators, there is a lack of profitability in existing models, despite holding the balance of power (and data).

The concept of “ghost production” and its associated typology is novel and offers a contribution to hospitality management literature by defining the term, scope and scale of this new phenomenon. Practical implications are proposed.

Co-production is an important process that alters value creation and improves the relationships between service providers and their customers. Such practice allows customers and service employees to access and leverage resources residing in their relationships. Clearly, the marketing-related literature focuses on the bright side of co-production. Nevertheless, the costs and potential negative consequences associated with its dark side must be further investigated. Therefore, this study aims to present a conceptual framework that explores the relationships among co-production, co-production enjoyment, co-production intensity, service effort, and job stress, and their effects on value co-creation, value co-destruction and customer satisfaction.

This study was conducted on the basis of dyadic data; the process incorporates both the customer and the corresponding service employee into a single unit of analysis. The proposed model was tested by using a structural equation model that involves LISREL analyses.

The results of this study indicate that co-production influences co-production enjoyment, co-production intensity, service effort, and job stress. Co-production enjoyment and service effort increase value co-creation, whereas co-production intensity and job stress increase value co-destruction. Value co-creation and value co-destruction have different effects on customer satisfaction.

This study addresses the gap in the extant research and contributes to a better understanding of the double-sided effects of co-production by integrating employees and customers into a single dyadic and comprehensive model.

The purpose of this research is to detect, through applying a process-based view, how to manage economisation of the maintenance and modification operations in offshore petroleum logistics operations.

A single case study of engineering services, more specifically, maintenance and modification service operations, on a Norwegian Sea oil platform reveals the dynamics of building network capabilities in a consistent network structure. Two layers of coordination are studied: the engineering process and its context, represented by its network of interconnected firms. This case study empirically grounds how engineering service involves managing reciprocally interdependent exchange processes in the network structure.

Pooled interdependencies are vital in understanding the nature of service provision and use, and sequential interdependencies are vital in narrating the timing of processes to reveal the nature of process emergence to coordinate strings of production events. Furthermore, the network structure, when characterised by multiple interdependent projects, is also dynamic but at a slower pace.

Through the case study, operations management is revealed to be associated with project emergence at two levels: the core process level regarding daily continuous change, including the changing interaction of multiple different and interdependent projects, and the contextual level, where features of interdependency and integration change, affecting engineering service production. This provides guidance as to the economisation of engineering services. They change not only interactions in the flow of production but also its context.

This paper aims to explore the topic of client co-production in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). The paper first sketches a theoretical background and reviews previous studies on factors affecting successful client co-production in such companies and then examines these factors via case study research among a small KIBS company and its five customers.

The paper is based on an in-depth analysis of literature devoted to client co-production in KIBS firms and on the results of case studies analysis. The authors explore theoretically and empirically the perception of factors behind a successful client co-production process of a KIBS company from the point of view of both customers and service provider. The examination resulted in the clarification of what a successful client-KIBS firm cooperation should look like and what kind of actions KIBS firms should undertake to provide it.

As the analysis shows, to perceive client-KIBS firm cooperation as successful, customers desire on hand immediate effects that would justify and compensate their time and money investments (e.g. new clients or brand recognition) and on the other hand, some of them desire positive changes in longer-term, which tangible form is associated with the newly obtained knowledge and more importantly, freshly developed and written strategy. Among the factors that influence the co-production process one can list teamwork, trust, communication and knowledge flows.

Research results are limited to one KIBS company operating in Poland and its five customers. As such, they are not conclusive for the whole KIBS sector. The findings of both literature review and case study analysis indicate that there are several outcomes that are expected from the point of view of a KIBS customer when selecting the service of a KIBS company. The paper examines important aspect of service co-production and provides practical guidelines how cooperation between KIBS firms and their customers should look like.

The paper examines the relationship between a client and a KIBS company and explores the factors influencing the successful outcome of this relation. The paper provides guidelines on how this type of relation should be handled by managers or owners of KIBS firms.

The paper contributes to the literature on KIBS firms, especially in the scarce area of practical mechanics of their cooperation with customers. The paper also suggests further research possibilities in this area.

Much has been written about the manifestations and managerial implications of customer co-production in service offerings. However, there have been relatively few references to issues of co-production in international service environments. Co-production is very relevant in international environments because of the requirements for interaction between producers and consumers, which interaction spans international borders and national cultures. The purpose of this paper is to apply an established theory of co-production, the Unified Service Theory (UST), to the international service context. This provides the authors with structured models for conceptualizing the co-productive nature of international service offerings and assessing-related managerial implications.

The UST provides a model of co-productive service delivery. Extending that model, the authors develop a taxonomy of international service based on the “four modes of service supply” provided in the General Agreement on Trade and Services instituted by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then, using data from the WTO and World Bank, the authors propose and test six hypotheses for predicting service exporting focus corresponding to the co-production taxonomy.

Based on the analysis of empirical data, the authors find more service exporting focus in small, growing, high-wage economies that have a significant service base and focus in merchandise exporting. The strength of these effects differs for different modes of service supply.

The authors also discuss cultural issues of international service, but the empirical analysis of culture effects is thus far inconclusive. Also, the analysis is limited to modeling and studying dyadic relationships, i.e., service providers in one country involved in an interchange with customers in another country. A natural extension would be to consider triads and more complex networks of co-productive service offerings.

This research shows how managerial implication of the UST can be extended to international service contexts. The authors review managerial implications pertaining to meeting variable demand, describing service characteristics, and pricing.

Co-production research is well-established in service management literature. This paper extends that research to international contexts by describing the WTO taxonomy in terms of the UST. This allows the authors to apply various insights of co-production to international service offerings.

The purpose of this paper is to present a process architecture pattern for designing particular components of a complex service. The proposal emphasizes the design of the service production flow component, following modularity ideas, which determines the sequence of actions needed to generate a high quality and efficient service. The authors report its applications to the design of the flow in a single emergency department (ED) case.

In complex services, production design is usually lacking because production activities are not clearly defined and, in many cases, they are dynamically determined as the service is produced according a client’s particular needs. In health services, for example ED, this generates a chaotic production flow that uses resources very inefficiently. The methodology uses a reference architecture, integrating it with disciplines – modularity, analytics and evaluation methods – that provide ideas for formally designing these complex services. This is mainly justified by the fact that, in many such services, no formal design exits and their production processes are the result of practice evolution.

Methodology was applied to the ED of a large public hospital. The authors first analyzed ED’s production and performance data. The authors found two patients’ groups that used more than 90 percent of resources. Therefore, design focused on these groups, defining specialized production lines for them and with physical space remodeled by an architecture project, resulting in well-defined separated workflows for each production line. Design also includes coordination with complementary shared services, including specialists consultations’ requests and execution, and request, processing and reception of laboratory and radiology examinations. The authors implemented new workflows producing a decrease of 26 percent in patients’ delays. More detailed results based on three months of observations also showed, for example, a reduction in examinations waiting times of 80 percent and an increase in the consultation resolution for cardiological patients from 24 to 80 percent in the same day, which means a significant quality increment.

Thus, the authors conclude the plausibility of the idea they proposed that an important design problem in health services, in terms of potential improvements in capacity utilization, is production design. This provides the opportunity to reduce investing large amounts of resources in new hospitals and to instead use the alternative to generate large amounts of capacity by production performance improvements.

The authors are replicating the approach in other hospitals with extensions to inpatient and ambulatory services.

Approach produces better service in public hospitals, which is a problem in emergencies in the world.

Formal design approach in health production services is proposed that provides great value by generating capacity, due to better use of resources, that reduces investment needs in new facilities.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of innovation in services. First, service firms were classified according to the degree of customization of service product and technology, because it reflects the degree of interaction between producer and consumer. This is a key element in the process of production and, hence, in the innovation developed by these firms. Second, we identified four different modes of innovation in Spanish service firms, which reflect diverse patterns of innovation according to depth of changes introduced by firms. Finally, we examined how the innovation patterns are generalized by the type of service firms, confirming that there is a relationship between production and innovation strategies. This paper yields empirical evidence from Spanish services, showing that service firms develop innovations coherently according to their production strategy.

Modularity has been identified as one of the most important methods for achieving mass customization. However, service models that apply varying levels of modularity and customization also exist and are appropriate for various business situations. The objective of this paper is to introduce a framework with which different customer service offerings, service production processes, and service production networks can be analyzed in terms of both modularity and customization.

The paper builds theory and offers a systematic approach for analyzing service modularity and customization. To illustrate the dimensions of the framework, the authors also provide service examples of the various aspects.

In the previous literature, the concepts of modularity and customization have often been discussed in an intertwined manner. The authors find that when modularity and customization are regarded as two separate dimensions, and different perspectives– such as the service offering, the service production process, and the service production network – are combined we can create a useful framework for analysis.

Rigorous testing is a subject for future research.

The framework helps companies to analyze their service offerings and to compare themselves with other companies. It seems that in practice many combinations of modularity and customization levels are used in the three perspectives.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing service offerings in terms of modularity and customization. The framework provides a basis for analyzing different combinations of these two aspects from the three perspectives, and herein lies its value.

A service production system has a structure composed of task execution, agents performing tasks and a resulting service output. The purpose of this paper is to understand how such a service production system changes as a consequence of offshoring.

Drawing on practice theory, the paper investigates how offshoring leads to reconfiguration of the service production system. Through a multiple case methodology, the authors demonstrate how agents and structures interact during reconfiguration.

The paper analyses the reconfiguration of components of a service production system in response to change ignited by offshoring. The authors find recurring effects between structures that enable and constrain agents and agents who shape the structure of the production system.

The paper offers a novel contribution to the service operations management literature by applying practice theory. Moreover, the authors propose a detailed, activity-driven view of service production systems and service offshoring. The authors contribute to practice theory by extending its domain to operations management.

Service production systems have the ability to self-correct any changes inflicted through offshoring of the systems, which helps firms that offshore.

The paper is aimed at service professionals and offshoring managers and proposes a novel presentation of the service production system with a description of how it responds to offshoring. The authors contribute to theory by applying practice theory to the fields of service operations management and offshoring.