Service Quality and Productivity Management


Book Description

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




Service Productivity Management


Book Description

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.




Managing Service Productivity


Book Description

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.




Integrating Productivity and Quality Management, Second Edition,


Book Description

This second edition details all productivity and quality methodologies, principles and techniques, and demonstrates how they interact in the three phases of the productivity and quality management triangle (PQMT): measurement, control and evaluation; planning and analysis; and improvement and monitoring. This edition features material on practical strategies for implementing quality programmes, balancing productivity and quality results , resolving quality problems and empowering employees.




Total Productivity Management (TPmgt)


Book Description

Poised to influence innovative management thinking into the 21st century, Total Productivity Management (TPmgt), written by one of the pioneers of productivity management, has been a decade in the making. This landmark publication is the most extensive book available on the subject of total productivity management. At a time when downsizing and layoffs are the norm, this innovative and highly organized book shows you how to treat human resource situations with a caring, customer-oriented, yet competitive attitude through integration of technical and human dimensions. This book makes use of a set of proven models and provides a systematic framework and structure to link total productivity to an organization's profitability. Total Productivity Management describes the tasks required of all constituents in an understandable format that they can relate to and by which regards can be realized for performance in all resource categories including direct labor, administrative staff, managers, professional personnel, materials, liquid assets, technologies, energy, and other areas.




Improving Service Quality in the Global Economy


Book Description

Within American service sector organizations there exists a gap between understanding customer service quality improvement (QI) theories and applying them. Improving Service Quality in the Global Economy: Achieving High Performance in Public and Private Sectors, Second Edition fills that gap by presenting theory, application models, and cases of su




Improving Public Sector Productivity


Book Description

This volume shows how public agencies can be made more efficient and humane, providing practical guidance to enhance both service quality and client satisfaction at local, state and national levels. Examples focus on the issues of quality management, improving service delivery, job reorganization and worker empowerment.




Managing Quality


Book Description

An essential quality management resource for students and practitioners alike—now in its sixth edition This popular and highly successful text on Quality Management has been fully revised and updated to reflect recent developments in the field. New to the Sixth Edition is timely coverage of agile development, emerging markets, product research, evidence based decision-making, and quality control. Some of the material has been re-ordered and changes to terminology have been made to bring the book completely up to date. Contributions from new co-author David Bamford offer insights from a veteran teacher and practitioner. A popular resource for students, academics, and business practitioners alike Combines the latest information on quality management system series standards with up-to-date tools, techniques and quality systems Includes insights on quality, operations management, and strategic process improvement Highly relevant for professionals, particularly those involved with reacting to rapid developments in the global market The word "quality" has many definitions, dependent on context and situation. It is often over-used but always in-demand, and it can make or break a business. Quality management is becoming an increasingly vital factor in the success of a product or service, and it requires constant attention and a continuous drive to do better. Managing Quality is a comprehensive resource that helps you ensure – and sustain – high quality standards.




Improving Service Quality


Book Description

Organizations are struggling to improve customer-focused quality in today's highly competitive domestic and global markets. Better design, implementation, and daily management of quality improvement strategies is essential for survival. Quality improvement principles, when thoughtfully applied and appropriately modified to meet all types of customer demands, are a sound means to respond to changing markets. However, when various quality and productivity theories and methods are applied without changing the organizational culture, it is very difficult to consistently deliver quality results. This important new book focuses on quality improvement methods for high performance in public and private services not covered in other books: applications focus on construction, education, government, insurance, public utilities, health care, and nonprofit services. Rather than detailing the technical processes to achieve inspection, planning, quality auditing, statistics, or risk assessment, this book presents step-by-step guidelines, recommendations, and action plans for changing service organizations to implement quality improvements. Sound theory and careful strategic planning are presented to assist readers in developing an understanding of how to select the essential elements of systems that best fit their customers' needs.




Service Profit Chain


Book Description

In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Why are a select few service firms better at what they do -- year in and year out -- than their competitors? For most senior managers, the profusion of anecdotal "service excellence" books fails to address this key question. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, Banc One, Waste Management, USAA, MBNA, Intuit, British Airways, Taco Bell, Fairfield Inns, Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the Merry Maids subsidiary of ServiceMaster employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity. The strongest relationships the authors discovered are those between (1) profit and customer loyalty; (2) employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and (3) employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Moreover, these relationships are mutually reinforcing; that is, satisfied customers contribute to employee satisfaction and vice versa. Here, finally, is the foundation for a powerful strategic service vision, a model on which any manager can build more focused operations and marketing capabilities. For example, the authors demonstrate how, in Banc One's operating divisions, a direct relationship between customer loyalty measured by the "depth" of a relationship, the number of banking services a customer utilizes, and profitability led the bank to encourage existing customers to further extend the bank services they use. Taco Bell has found that their stores in the top quadrant of customer satisfaction ratings outperform their other stores on all measures. At American Express Travel Services, offices that ticket quickly and accurately are more profitable than those which don't. With hundreds of examples like these, the authors show how to manage the customer-employee "satisfaction mirror" and the customer value equation to achieve a "customer's eye view" of goods and services. They describe how companies in any service industry can (1) measure service profit chain relationships across operating units; (2) communicate the resulting self-appraisal; (3) develop a "balanced scorecard" of performance; (4) develop a recognitions and rewards system tied to established measures; (5) communicate results company-wide; (6) develop an internal "best practice" information exchange; and (7) improve overall service profit chain performance. What difference can service profit chain management make? A lot. Between 1986 and 1995, the common stock prices of the companies studied by the authors increased 147%, nearly twice as fast as the price of the stocks of their closest competitors. The proven success and high-yielding results from these high-achieving companies will make The Service Profit Chain required reading for senior, division, and business unit managers in all service companies, as well as for students of service management.