Service industry

Creating and maintaining customer loyalty has become a strategic mandate in today's service markets. Recent research suggests that customers differ in their value to a firm, and therefore customer retention and loyalty-building efforts should not necessarily be targeted to all customers of a firm. Given these sentiments, it is becoming increasingly necessary for firms to have a thorough understanding of their customer base. Yet current knowledge is limited in providing insights to firms regarding the differences within their customer base. This research comprises two studies in which the authors examine the differences among internal customer groups in a service industry. As theory suggests and as is empirically validated here, customers who have switched service providers because of dissatisfaction seem to differ significantly from other customer groups in their satisfaction and loyalty behaviors. The findings offer some interesting implications for both marketing theory and pr...

The aim of this paper is to describe product market competition in the Belgian economy for the period 1997 ]2004 and to illustrate some causality with market regulation. The analysis is held at the industry level, for selected manufacturing and services industries. Emphasis is given to the profit elasticity (PE) measurement of competition (the gBoone h indicator) and the average profitability (AP) indicator (an approximation of the mark ]up indicator). We applied the OECD Regimpact indicator as a proxy for regulation. We present some stylized facts, for Belgium in comparison with selected EU countries; and through an econometric exercise we illustrate the potential of regulation as an explanatory variable for competition.

This paper presents an extensive review on the services, six-sigma, and application of six-sigma in services. In order to improve service quality focus on service process is necessary. Six-sigma is a philosophy which also concentrates on the improvement of ...

Service enterprises have traditionally used organizational models from the manufacturing and industrial sectors, incorporating ideas such as hierarchy, task repetition, and standardization of procedures. However, these disciplined production systems tend to use humans more than machines in the production of services, which we posit may lead to significant organizational problems. Consequently, we conducted an ethnographic study on the notion of “human risks” in service companies from the Geneva region, which is known primarily for its banking sector. Our study is based on transcripts from more than sixty semi-directed interviews conducted over the last two years. Our findings and analyses indicate that service companies are indeed quite “industrialized,” and that “process normalization,” which is intended to mitigate operational risks in service industries, is actually at the core of significant organizational risks.

Abstract:
OBJECTIVE:
To understand how lean thinking has been put into practice in healthcare and how it has worked.

DESIGN:
A realist literature review. Data sources The authors systematically searched for articles in PubMed, Web of Science and Business Source Premier (January 1998 to February 2008) and then added articles through a snowball approach.

REVIEW METHODS:
The authors included empirical studies of lean thinking applications in healthcare and excluded those articles that did not influence patient care, or reported hybrid approaches. The authors conducted a thematic analysis based on data collected using an original abstraction form. Based on this, they articulated interactions between context, lean interventions, mechanisms and outcomes.

RESULTS:
The authors reviewed 33 articles and found a wide range of lean applications. The articles describe initial implementation stages and emphasise technical aspects. All articles report positive results. The authors found common contextual aspects which interact with different components of the lean interventions and trigger four different change mechanisms: understand processes to generate shared understanding; organise and design for effectiveness and efficiency; improve error detection to increase awareness and process reliability; and collaborate to systematically solve problems to enhance continual improvement.

CONCLUSIONS:
Lean thinking has been applied successfully in a wide variety of healthcare settings. While lean theory emphasises a holistic view, most cases report narrower technical applications with limited organisational reach. To better realise the potential benefits, healthcare organisations need to directly involve senior management, work across functional divides, pursue value creation for patients and other customers, and nurture a long-term view of continual improvement.

While developing touch-screen displays for the food-service industry, the need for adjustability was investigated. Although there are many guidelines for the design and placement of monitors and keyboards in the office environment, there are few such guidelines for touch-screen ...

In this paper we propose a more positive and useful reading of the cost disease. We present a case for re-focussing the general attention from the characteristics of the cost disease (i.e. the widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most important aspect of the cost disease is a fundamental intuition: some types of labour provide particular contributions to various production processes that capital and new technologies are not able to replace. We also discuss the implications of these findings.

Technology Management is a dynamically evolving discipline that integrates the technologydominated world of the engineer with management. The field is distinguishable from its neighbor disciplines through characteristic research questions, specialized Production, and more than 200 educational programs. Currently, the field changes its face and increasingly focuses on the service industry. It thus reflects the blur-ring boundaries between services and goods companies and the service sector's growing dependency on (information) technology. This paper describes these changes and presents contributions of Technology Management to SSME. Based on these findings and a survey of industry needs in the “Silicon Forest”, it outlines an agenda for education and research.

... that repatronage intentions and word-of-mouth intentions are indeed different loyalty constructs, we argue that it may be unwise to simply assume that they have identical associations with other variables which represent antecedents to and consequences of loyalty, and we ...