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This article sets out to prove that the basic concepts and techniques of reliability engineering, which are normally applied to material products, can also be applied effectively to intangible services. It deals in some detail with the power and communication industries and refers also to government.

The purpose of this research is to add to our understanding of the antecedents of customer satisfaction by examining the effects of service reliability (Is the service “correctly” produced?) and service validity (Is the “correct” service produced?) of search, experience and credence services.

Service validity and service reliability were manipulated in scenarios describing service encounters with different types of services. Customer satisfaction was measured using questionnaires.

Service validity and service reliability independently affect customer satisfaction with search services. For experience services, service validity and service reliability are necessary conditions for customer satisfaction. For credence services, no effects of service validity were found but the effects of service reliability on customers' satisfaction were profound.

Scenarios provided a useful method to investigate customer evaluation of different types of service situations. A limitation of this method was that the participants were not observed in a real service situation but had to give their opinion on hypothetical scenarios.

For search and credence services, it is possible to compensate low service validity by providing a highly reliable service. However, managers of experience services should be aware that little can be gained when either service validity or service reliability is faulty.

The present study provides empirical data on the effects of service reliability and the thus far neglected effects of service validity and integrates these (new) concepts in the model of information verification.

The purpose of this study is to highlight special characteristics of building services systems and investigate how practitioners view reliability and maintenance. These characteristics include energy‐hungry services systems, operating modes, maintenance types, the relationship between procurement costs and maintenance costs.

The practitioners' viewpoints on reliability and maintenance are explored through a workshop. The authors wish to draw the attention of researchers in the reliability and maintenance community and furthermore emphasise the difference between building services systems and systems in industries other than construction.

It is shown that a lack of failure data and maintenance data is the main problem from both academic researchers' and industrial practitioner's points of view. The paper suggests that there exists no fixed cost ratio available to apply to building services systems; the analysis of RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety) should include duty cycles and the environment; and clients of the construction industry would benefit from mandating a LCC to be applied to the build.

The gap between academia and practitioners should be bridged through better understanding each other's needs. Accurately estimating the ratio between procurement and maintenance costs is needed from a whole life costing perspective.

This paper is a good reference for building designers, facility managers and maintenance staff of building services systems. It also offers reliability researchers references on special characteristics of building services systems.

To succeed, service businesses must offer their customers high‐quality, reliable service. However, many of the characteristics that make services unique also make it difficult to ensure consistently correct performance. To promptly identify and correct errors when they occur, service managers have been advised to include recovery steps in their service processes. However, while service recovery has anecdotal support, the literature has so far not offered management tools for analytically evaluating a system's needs for recovery measures or assessing their potential benefit. To provide such a tool, this paper transfers the logic of reliability theory, which is widely used in the design of electrical and mechanical systems. The application of this approach yields several useful insights for managers, to include the effects of various process structure characteristics.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen competition emerge within industries traditionally imbued with monopoly status, for instance, the field of telecommunications. Within these industries, increased competition and the threat of the removal of statutory monopoly has resulted in greater awareness regarding the impact of quality on service and efficient pricing. Discusses, as an example, postal services, an industry of immense importance worldwide, suggests that the emphasis postal services place on the implementation of both timely and reliable service and competitive prices will inherently determine the success they will have withstanding the ever growing threat of international and national competition. While postal services and public utilities share similar peak‐load problems as discussed in the traditional natural monopoly literature, limited deferrability of mail service, together with service differentiated pricing, yields a framework sufficiently different so as to warrant a separate analysis. Presents a model which considers this analysis by developing welfare‐optimal prices, reliabilities and capacities under conditions of stochastic demand subject to reliability constraints on service quality and a minimum profit Ramsey constraint.

This paper aims to propose a service reliability framework for classifying technical reliability tools so that managers can better understand how to use them in practice.

Published research was examined to identify reliability tools that have been used in services. These tools were then categorized using a framework that considered subsystem reliability, system configuration and system reliability.

A number of traditional manufacturing reliability tools have been used in service companies. This paper has categorized those tools within a service reliability framework based on subsystem reliability, configuration and system reliability.

Future research could address the issue of customer perception and customer feedback as part of the reliability appraisal process.

Service managers can use the proposed framework to examine the applicability of these technical tools in service operations and to guide reliability improvement efforts.

The proposed service reliability framework provides an integrated view of subsystems, systems and configuration that is lacking in the service management literature. The framework also emphasizes technical reliability tools that have not received sufficient attention in the service management literature.

This study aims to develop a hierarchical reliability framework to evaluate the service delivery performance of education public–private partnerships (PPPs) effectively and efficiently during long-term operations.

The research design included development and test phases. In the development phase, three performance layers, i.e. indicator, component and system, in the education service delivery system were identified. Then, service component reliability was computed through first order reliability method (FORM). Finally, the reliability of the service system was obtained using dynamic component weightings. A PPP school example in Australia was set up in the test phase, where performance indicators were collected from relevant contract documents and performance data were simulated under three assumptive scenarios.

The example in the test phase yielded good results for the developed framework in evaluating uncertainties of service delivery performance for education PPPs. Potentially underperforming services from the component to the system level at dynamic timepoints were identified, and effective preventative maintenance strategies were developed.

This research enriches reliability theory and performance evaluation research on education PPPs. First, a series of performance evaluation indicators are constructed for assessing the performance of the service delivery of the education PPP operations. Then, a reliability-based framework for service components and system is developed to predict service performance of the PPP school operations with consideration of a range of uncertainties during project delivery.

The developed framework was illustrated with a real-world case study. It demonstrates that the developed reliability-based framework could potentially provide the practitioners of the public sector with a basis for developing effective preventative maintenance strategies with the aim of prolonging the service life of the PPP schools.

Evaluating education PPPs is challenging as it involves long-term measurement of various service components under uncertainty. The developed reliability-based framework is a valuable tool to ensure that reliability is maintained throughout the service life of education PPPs in the presence of uncertainty.

In a recent article in this journal, Gunes and Deveci proposed the use of failure rate analysis, a technique commonly used to determine reliability rates of products, systems and components, to determine reliability rates of service systems. They also presented an application of this concept to a student office service system. This paper first extends this idea to multi‐stage service systems. Next, it illustrates how several other concepts and techniques of reliability engineering can be applied for measuring reliability rates of services. Two case studies where such techniques were applied are presented. It will also discuss how customers view reliability of a service and how objective measures of reliability rates based on reliability engineering concepts and techniques can be combined with customer expectations and perceptions to set performance standards for a service.

Until recently the concept and practice of reliability has been applied mainly to tangible products — manufactured goods, components, machines, systems — there is now a growing effort worldwide to apply basic reliability techniques to service industries. Can they be effective?

Service processes have different performance requirements than those of production processes because of their characteristics. In literature, a few studies can be seen in the field of reliability of service processes. Generally, reliability of service processes is taken into consideration in a verbal sense and regarded that “reliability is satisfied by delivering service to customers on time.” In this study, a procedure to determine the reliability of service processes is suggested and the procedure is applied in a student’s office.