Service and Operation Management | Online Assignment Help
An individual analysis of no more than 1,000 words regarding improvement of an existing Service Process in APA referencing style. And presentation should be in a report format.
In this assignment you will analyze a sub-optimal service process. You can identify any sub-optimal process of interest to you, whether it be a service process you have personally experienced or a recent news story. A sub-optimal service process is one in which the intended outcome or value of the service was not properly delivered and there was a distinct gap between the service expected and the service delivered. You should critically assess this gap in terms of why it happened, what were the costs and how it should/could be remedied. You should apply the course concepts learnt during the first four weeks of the course.
To guide you in this task, you should draw from the following course materials:
1. The lecture slides and reading materials for the weeks leading up to the due date.
2. The Grading Criteria shown below that will be used to grade your final work.
This assignment is worth 10% of your overall course grade and is to be submitted as a word file. In APA referencing style, using peer reviewed articles.
The following journals are excellent reference sources for this purpose:
â— Production and Operations Management
â— Journal of Operations Management
â— Decision Sciences Journal
â— Supply Chain Management: An International Journal
â— International Journal of Operations and Production Management
â— International Journal of Production Research
â— International Journal of Production Economics
â— Harvard Business Review
â— Academy of Management Review/Journal
â— California Management Review
â— Sloan Management Review
Week 1 Review Topic and Discussion
Discuss the nature of services and how (and why) they differ from manufactured goods. What is it about services that attracts such emotions from consumers when they go wrong? As consumers are we really able to judge a good service from a bad service given service performance is often very subjective? Are consumers capable of judging ‘service quality’?
Week 2 Review Topic and Discussion
In a bad economy, evidence suggests that service businesses will usually suffer the most. People spend less and view many services as non-essential (e.g. restaurants, dry cleaning, pet grooming, clothing purchases). Because spending on services is typically the first to be cut back by consumers, service businesses often have to re-consider how they compete and seek to innovate during a bad economy.
Agree or disagree with this view (and tell us why you agree or disagree).
Week 3 Review Topic and Discussion
This discussion should revolve around concepts learnt during Week 3 – “New Service Development”. The readings that inform this topic are Fitzsimmons et al, Ch 3 and Bettencourt and Ulwick (2008).
Argue the merit (or otherwise) of either of the following statements:
– Innovation in service design should always be driven by ‘customer-centric’ goals.
– Innovation in services is driven less by customer behavior and more by changes in technology, available resources, and company culture. In fact, one could argue that company culture explains a majority of innovation in services (or lack thereof).
The above are just for class discussions for week 1-4
