Service Science

A comprehensive treatment on the use of quantitative modelingfor decision making and best practices in the serviceindustries Making up a significant part of the world economy, the servicesector is a rapidly evolving field that is relied on to dictate thepublic's satisfaction and success in various areas of everydaylife, from banking and communications to education and healthcare.Service Science provides managers and students of the serviceindustries with the quantitative skills necessary to model keydecisions and performance metrics associated with services,including the management of resources, distribution of goods andservices to customers, and the analysis and design of queueingsystems. The book begins with a brief introduction to the service sectorfollowed by an introduction to optimization and queueing modeling,providing the methodological background needed to analyze servicesystems. Subsequent chapters present specific topics within serviceoperations management, including: * Location modeling and districting * Resource allocation problems * Short- and long-term workforce management * Priority services, call center design, and customerscheduling * Inventory modeling * Vehicle routing The author's own specialized software packages for locationmodeling, network optimization, and time-dependent queueing areutilized throughout the book, showing readers how to solve avariety of problems associated with service industries. Theseprograms are freely available on the book's related web site alongwith detailed appendices and online spreadsheets that accompany thebook's "How to Do It in Excel" sections, allowing readers to workhands-on with the presented techniques. Extensively class-tested to ensure a comprehensive presentation,Service Science is an excellent book for industrial engineering andmanagement courses on service operations at the upper-undergraduateand graduate levels. The book also serves as a reference forresearchers in the fields of business, management science,operations research, engineering, and economics. This book was named the 2010 Joint Publishers Book ofthe Year by the Institute of Industrial Engineers.