Service Productivity Management

The service economy is now the largest portion of the industrialized world's economic activity. This development has dramatically raised the importance of maximizing productivity excellence in service organizations. The correlation between the service economy and productivity excellence has lead service organization managers to recognize the value of using benchmarking techniques to identify and adopt best practices in their organizations. As the use of benchmarking metrics in service organizations has increased, correspondingly these organizations have improved continuously by allowing service units to learn from methods that prove the most effective. Service Productivity Management provides the insights and methods to answers questions on a whole range of productivity issues, of which some examples are: How do you manage profitability of a network of hundreds or thousands of branch offices disbursed over several states and countries? How can managed-care organizations manage the quality and cost of hundreds of physicians providing health services to millions of plan members? What methods would enable a government to ensure that the multiple offices serving citizens across a country are operating at low cost while meeting the required service quality? Each of these service settings are examples of the many service providers that deliver a complex set of services to a widely diversified set of customers. The book systematically explores complex service issues and analyzes each case for a variety of ways to improve service productivity, quality, and profitability. Service Productivity Management is an in-depth guide to using the most powerful available benchmarking technique to improveservice organization performance -- Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). (1) It outlines the use of DEA as a benchmarking technique. (2) It identifies high costs service units. (3) It isolates specific changes to each service unit to elevate their performance to the best practice services level providing high quality service at low cost. (4) And most important, it guides the improvement process. The discussion and methods are all supported by case-study applications to organizations that have sought and have successfully improved its performance. The techniques discussed in the book are accessible to any and all managers with access to Microsoft. Excel spreadsheet software (Excel). Throughout the book, step-by-step guidance is provided to enable any reader to apply DEA and the Excel software to their organization. Packaged with the book comes a ready-to-use DEA software CD for Microsoft. Excel Add-in to run DEA analyses on any set of organizations of interest to the reader.