Download or read book The Service Productivity and Quality Challenge written by P.T. Harker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3 While all of these explanations seem to have merit, there is one dominant reason why the percentage of GDP and employment dedicated to services has continued to increase: low productivity. According to Baumol's cost disease hypothesis (Baumol, Blackman, and Wolff 1991), the growth in services is actually an illusion. The fact is that service-sector productivity is improving slower than that of manufacturing and thus, it seems as if we are consuming more services in nominal terms. However, in real terms, we are consuming slightly less services. That is, the increase in the service sector is caused by low productivity relative to manufacturing. The implication of Baumol's cost disease is the following. Assuming historical productivity increases for manufacturing, agriCUlture, education and health care, Baumol (1992) shows that the U. S. can triple its output in all sectors within 50 years. However, due to the higher productivity level for manufacturing and agriculture, it will take substantially more employment in services to achieve this increase in output. To put this argument in perspective, simply roll back the clock 100 years or so and replace the words manufacturing with agriculture, and services with manufacturing. The phenomenal growth in agricultural productivity versus manufacturing caused the employment levels in agriculture in the U. S. to decrease rapidly while producing a truly unbelievable amount of food. It is the low productivity of services that is the real culprit in its growth of GDP and employment share.

Download or read book Managing Service Productivity written by Ali Emrouznejad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume describes how frontier efficiency methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other techniques such as multi-criteria decision making can help service industries to improve their performance by providing a ranking of best-practice efficient service units and by identifying sources of inefficiency for each service unit. It explains how they can be used to determine potential improvement targets for each of the inefficient service units, to identify peers for each service organization and to provide a basis for continuous performance improvement. Presenting applications in a variety of industries, this book will be useful for the service management to improve service productivity, profitability, sustainability and quality and effectiveness of service deliveries. A free trial version of the World’s leading Data Envelopment Analysis Software (PIM-DEA) is available for readers of this book.

Download or read book Service Quality and Productivity Management written by Jochen Wirtz and published by Ws Professional. This book was released on 2017 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface -- Introduction -- Integrating service quality and productivity strategies -- What is a service quality? -- Identifying and correcting service quality problems -- Measuring service quality -- Soft and hard service quality measures -- Learning from customer feedback -- Hard measures of service quality -- Tools to analyze and address service quality problems -- Return on quality -- Defining and measuring productivity -- Improving service productivity -- Conclusion -- Summary -- Endnotes

Download or read book Service Productivity Management written by H. David Sherman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-09-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is an in-depth guide to the most powerful available benchmarking technique for improving service organization performance — Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The book outlines DEA as a benchmarking technique, identifies high cost service units, isolates specific changes for elevating performance to the best practice services level providing high quality service at low cost and most important, it guides the improvement process.

Download or read book The Service Profit Chain written by James L. Heskett and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-04-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.

Download or read book The 5 Choices written by Kory Kogon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-12-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The 5 Choices provides the methods to get the right things done, not try to get everything done, and to feel like you made a meaningful contribution at the end of the day.” —Kevin Turner, former COO of Microsoft For fans of Deep Work, Great at Work, and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 5 Choices is an essential guide for understanding productivity and time-management in the 21st century. Every day brings us a crushing wave of demands: a barrage of texts, emails, interruptions, meetings, phone calls, tweets, breaking news—not to mention the high-pressure demands of our jobs—which can be overwhelming and exhausting. The sheer number of distractions can threaten our ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and accomplish what matters most, leaving us worn out and frustrated. From the business experts at FranklinCovey, The 5 Choices is an exploration of modern productivity. It offers powerful insights drawn from the latest neuroscience research and decades of experience in the time-management field to help you master your attention and energy management. The 5 Choices is time management redefined: through five fundamental choices, it increases the productivity of individuals, teams, and organizations, and empowers individuals to make selective, high-impact choices about where to invest their valuable time, attention, and energy. The 5 Choices—like “Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent” and “Rule Your Technology, Don’t Let It Rule You”—will not only increase your productivity, but also provide a renewed sense of engagement and accomplishment. You will quickly find yourself moving beyond thinking, “I was so busy today, what did I actually accomplish?” to confidently realizing “I did everything I needed to accomplish today—and did it meaningfully.”

Download or read book Driving Service Productivity written by John Bessant and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world moving towards services, driving service productivity is a central challenge for leaders and members of all types of organisations: for service businesses there is a clear need to be “productive”, but it is far less clear what this exactly means. In this book, we invite you on a journey that explores the ways, tools and options for driving service productivity. We take an innovator’s perspectives and look at the tricky challenge of service productivity as a landscape of options for designing the future of services. Case examples, from the airport, hotel, healthcare, and professional service industry, offer insights in the methods used and approaches taken in business practice. Research results provide food for thought and valuable advice on the path towards superior service productivity. Throughout the book we also listen to the views and advices of interviewed experts from academia as well as business practice on how to drive service productivity. A forecast on how service productivity and service innovation might evolve in the future provides us – and hopefully you as a reader – with the necessary food for thought to develop our own understanding of driving service productivity in different business settings. Overall, this book is not a traditional “academic product” that summarises the views of a few, but a co-created offering that profited enormously from the contributions of so many.

Download or read book Improving Productivity and Service in Depot Businesses written by Colin Woodland and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is specifically for working operations managers across the broad range of business types that deploy fleet and product via a myriad of service types. It is applicable to businesses with small medium to large fleets in haulage, 3PL, and any service business operating a depot structure. The book is less about theoretical concepts – although specific references point to theories including Lean, continuous improvement, net promoter score, and balanced scorecard – but is essentially a practical guide applying worked examples and generic templates regarding the core ten activities that are critical to achieving service and profit expectation in any depot, route-based business deploying fleet. Every working manager – front-line to COO – will identify with and grasp that these are fundamental areas and that, if improvement can be sustained, will deliver better service to customers and enhanced profit in both local and business levels. The key areas examined are: People management Fleet management Route scheduling Optimisation of non-productive (on-depot) time Driver debrief Customer service and complaint management and measurement Key performance indicators The operating rhythm Continuous improvement

Download or read book Innovative Technologies for Increasing Service Productivity written by Manohar, Sridhar and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Service organizations are grappling with unprecedented challenges in maintaining and enhancing productivity. As the landscape evolves, traditional approaches to service operations become obsolete, necessitating a deep understanding of the intricate dynamics at play. Innovative Technologies for Increasing Service Productivity delves into this urgent issue, offering a comprehensive exploration of the trends and challenges confronting service industries. The book sheds light on the impact of digital transformation, emerging technologies, and disruptive business models, serving as a guide for navigating the complexities of service productivity in an ever-changing environment. As a groundbreaking solution, this book not only identifies challenges but provides various solutions for service organizations to thrive amidst technological disruption. Its unique selling points lie in the breadth of its coverage, spanning diverse service industries and dissecting the symbiotic relationship between technology and productivity. Offering practical strategies and tools, the book equips service professionals with the means to enhance productivity, quality, and customer experience. By connecting the gap between theoretical insights and practical implementation, it stands as a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and service managers seeking innovative solutions to the evolving landscape of service productivity.

Download or read book Exploring Service Productivity written by Claudia Lehmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-23 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claudia Lehmann explores service productivity from the providers, customer and operations perspective in the German airport industry using a solid empirical foundation. Available service productivity concepts, methods, measurements and their ability to overcome the emphasized problems are discussed, suggesting ways on how to deal with them. The insights of this book deliver considerable value for both management and academia.

Download or read book Achieving Service Productivity written by Erik Hörnell and published by Financial Times/Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1994 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains how to achieve productivity in service industries. It provides management with learning points on how some of the world's best companies have kept ahead of the competition. It covers a wide range of service industries including retail banking, supermarkets, hospitals and schools and includes international case studies from companies such as Credit Suisse, Banc One, Woolworths and the Henry Ford Hospital in the USA. Improving Productivity in Service Companies highlights the lessons learnt, analyses the key success factors, identifies the ways in which these have altered as technology and consumer requirements have changed, and will give you information on how to be more efficient.

Download or read book Measuring and Improving Productivity in Services written by Faridah Djellal and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of how to measure and improve productivity in services has been a recurrent topic in political debates and in academic studies for several decades. The concept of productivity, which was developed initially for industrial and agricultural economies poses few difficulties when applied to standardized products. The advent of the service economy contributed to call into question, if not the relevance of this concept, at least its definition and measurement methods. This book takes stock of the issues met by productivity in services on theoretical, methodological and operational levels. The authors examine various definitions of productivity and the main methods of its measurement. A survey of recent conceptual and methodological debates on the notion of productivity is also presented. A more operational and strategic perspective is then adopted in order to identify and analyze the main levers, factors and determinants for improving productivity and, more generally, the actual strategies adopted for this purpose in firms and organisations. Providing a deep understanding of the specific and underestimated performance processes within service industries, this book will be of great interest to those involved in industrial economics, management science and public administration.

Download or read book Achieving Service Excellence written by C. M. Chang and published by Business Expert Press. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the service sectors play an increasingly important role in all economies worldwide, service executives and professionals are well advised to recognize two main pathways to achieving sustainable success in services. The first path requires enhancing the strategic differentiation and operational excellence of their service enterprises; the second requires that these executives and their employees develop the knowledge and skills needed to achieve such success. Specifically, this book discusses actionable methodologies needed to generate creative ideas, including deciding on which ones to pursue; on how to justify projects financially; on how to manage the development projects for innovative services; and on how to reach out to customers and offer them superior service support.

Download or read book Improving Public Sector Productivity written by Ellen D. Rosen and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 1993-07-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The productivity of America′s public agencies has never been more closely scrutinized. Taxpayers have drawn the line on what they are--and are not--willing to pay for governmental programs. Both public servants and their clients have an equal stake in making public agencies more productive and respected. Public agencies can be made more efficient, effective, and humane, and Improving Public Sector Productivity shows how. Ellen Rosen provides practical guidance to enhance both the service quality and client satisfaction of public agencies at the local, state, and national level. A wealth of current cases and examples focuses on the issues of quality management, improving service delivery, job reorganization, and worker empowerment. The author also details methods for measuring public productivity. Policymakers, public sector managers, researchers, and students of public administration will find Improving Public Sector Productivity an indispensable toolkit of ideas, strategies, and applications for making better use of taxpayers′ money. "This book is a welcome addition to the literature because it offers practical solutions as well as discussing theoretical issues. . . .The book is aimed at the serious student and practitioner of public administration and because it is written in a way that combines theory with practice, it is accessible to this audience. --Urban Studies "Managers and elected officials will find a ′tool-kit′ of ideas, strategies, and applications for making better use of taxpayers′ money--all based on sound rationale and of proven worth. The productivity concerns provided in the book can help improve service quality and client satisfaction, while being sensitive to employee concerns and asking them to contribute to the enterprise." --Beverly A. Cigler, The Pennsylvania State University "Ellen Doree Rosen′s book, Improving Public Sector Productivity, Concepts, and Practice provides some very useful information and ideas on how to attain higher levels of productivity. The book succeeds, however, in clearly explaining the many constraints on public administration which militate against achieving high levels of focus and efficiency. Improving the Public Sector Productivity et al. is thought provoking, intelligent, and one of the more practical public administration texts I′ve read. I recommend it to professors and students for its clear-eyed description of the issues practitioners must deal with in attempting to improve the way public business is conducted. It is a superior guide for those in the field who could often use a conceptual framework to help assess where we are and to mark a path in the direction we need to go." --Mark Miller, Orange County Chapter of the American Society of Public Administration

Download or read book Managing Service Productivity written by Ali Emrouznejad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume describes how frontier efficiency methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other techniques such as multi-criteria decision making can help service industries to improve their performance by providing a ranking of best-practice efficient service units and by identifying sources of inefficiency for each service unit. It explains how they can be used to determine potential improvement targets for each of the inefficient service units, to identify peers for each service organization and to provide a basis for continuous performance improvement. Presenting applications in a variety of industries, this book will be useful for the service management to improve service productivity, profitability, sustainability and quality and effectiveness of service deliveries. A free trial version of the World’s leading Data Envelopment Analysis Software (PIM-DEA) is available for readers of this book.

Download or read book Improving Performance in Service Organizations written by Joyce Ann Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improving Performance in Service Organizations guides professionals through the application of lean concepts and methods in the service sector. Agencies can use this innovative approach to analyze operations and determine ways to eliminate activities that are wasteful and add no value to the services delivered. Service organizations that undergo a lean transformation optimize the use of time and money associated with operations and ensure that scarce resources are allocated to the activities that produce the greatest value for clients served. Using a lean lens within the context of the organization's goals and mission taps into the latent energy and innovative ideas of personnel and releases resources trapped in a vicious cycle of wasted work efforts. By applying the lean concepts, methods, and tools introduced in this book and creating a culture of continuous improvement, service organizations can increase effectiveness and improve accountability for the funding they receive. This book is also well suited for academic courses in quality improvement/business operations management in business and/or social service programs.

Download or read book Getting Things Done written by David Allen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book Lifehack calls "The Bible of business and personal productivity." "A completely revised and updated edition of the blockbuster bestseller from 'the personal productivity guru'"—Fast Company Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots. Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text with important perspectives on the new workplace, and adding material that will make the book fresh and relevant for years to come. This new edition of Getting Things Done will be welcomed not only by its hundreds of thousands of existing fans but also by a whole new generation eager to adopt its proven principles.