Service Quality And Productivity Management

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

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.

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.

USA. Monograph outlining management techniques for increasing quality standard, labour productivity and profitability - describes a management policy focusing on successful organizational planning, efficiency in resource allocation and operational management in context with competitiveness among businesses and reduced need for quality control. Diagrams.

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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2011, held in Kaunas, Lithuania, in October 2011. The 25 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: e-government and e-governance, e-services, digital goods and products, e-business process modeling and re-engineering, innovative e-business models and implementation, e-health and e-education, and innovative e-business models.