Service Operations Management: Improving Service Delivery

Citation

Van Dierdonck, R. (2006), "Service Operations Management: Improving Service Delivery", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 99-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/09564230610651606

This book is written to be a text book for various levels of students (undergraduates to executives) supporting a course in service operations management. I have tried to read the book from this perspective, although, as I will state later, the book is not always focused on that objective.

I welcome this textbook if only because it has a global scope. One of the key features of teaching service (operations) management is precisely that all participants have direct experience, as customers, in the service sector, the service delivery processes and many of the problems tackled in this book.

It is therefore important not to alienate readers by using a textbook clearly written for an American audience, with only American case examples for instance. One of the strong points of the book is no doubt this global perspective with globally chosen and recognised examples and cases.

Another strong point of the book is precisely the cases or the “boxes”. They are generally well chosen. This is, however, not the case for all of them. Sometimes, certainly in the earlier chapters, it was difficult to see the focus of the case or example. There is an abundance of cases and examples which is positive, but one wonders if it would not have been better to be a bit more selective. The readability and the focus of the learning would no doubt have gained from such a selective attitude. Also, most of the cases are of the descriptive type, putting the reader in a passive observer role and limiting the discussion to identification and evaluation. As a textbook one should have tried to put the reader in a more active role as a decision maker. The teacher will have to supplement the book with discussion cases.

In service management one has to take an interfunctional perspective. One of the strengths of the book is that it takes a very broad perspective. It deals with HR‐issues, marketing issues, strategic management issues, technological issues … etc. The author cannot be reproached of taking a myopic view. The danger, however, of taking such a broad view is that some focus is lost and that the reader gets disappointed or at least alienated. The essence of operations management is designing and managing (delivery) processes. It takes until Chapter 6 before one deals with this issue. As a matter of fact for a student interested in operations management the book will be disappointing. Only three or four chapters out of 15 deal with operations management topics. The book is more about service management than operations management.

I therefore think that the book is less suited for somebody without an operations management background. In other words, one has to have acquired a strong (educational or experimental) operations background elsewhere. I therefore would not recommend the book for undergraduate students. Service operations managers at the contrary might find in this book stimulating ideas to broaden their perspective.

The book tackles many concepts and schemes, some of them new, at least in an operations management book. Again this is positive. At the other hand the book becomes a bit encyclopaedic, and therefore looses focus. It is nice to be confronted with a lot of concepts, but the reader is quite not given any guidance of how to compass, select and apply them. Certainly, in a textbook one would expect a more selective approach of the authors and have them given more advice on how to apply them. More than once the reader has to read something, hoping that perhaps later it would be applied or proven to be useful, but is left unsatisfied.

To conclude, I want to state that this book is a welcome addition in service management literature. It will prove to be useful for widening the perspective of serve operations and other MBA students. The book could have gained from a more selective attitude and a more tight focus on the object of the learning process.