Service Science (Hardcover)

A comprehensive treatment on the use of quantitative modeling for decision making and best practices in the service industries

 

Making up a significant part of the world economy, the service sector is a rapidly evolving field that is relied on to dictate the public's satisfaction and success in various areas of everyday life, from banking and communications to education and healthcare. Service Science provides managers and students of the service industries with the quantitative skills necessary to model key decisions and performance metrics associated with services, including the management of resources, distribution of goods and services to customers, and the analysis and design of queueing systems.

The book begins with a brief introduction to the service sector followed by an introduction to optimization and queueing modeling, providing the methodological background needed to analyze service systems. Subsequent chapters present¿specific topics within service operations management, including:

• Location modeling and districting

• Resource allocation problems

• Short- and long-term workforce management

• Priority services, call center design, and customer scheduling

• Inventory modeling

• Vehicle routing

The author's own specialized software packages for location modeling, network optimization, and time-dependent queueing are utilized throughout the book, showing readers how to solve a variety of problems associated with service industries. These programs are freely available on the book's related web site along with detailed appendices and online spreadsheets that accompany the book's "How to Do It in Excel" sections, allowing readers to work hands-on with the presented techniques.

Extensively class-tested to ensure a comprehensive presentation, Service Science is an excellent book for industrial engineering and management courses on service operations at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. The book also serves as a reference for researchers in the fields of business, management science, operations research, engineering, and economics.