2024年6月11日发(作者：)

一、differences

Though the primary function of both manufacturers and service providers is to satisfy customer

needs, there are several important differences between the two types of operations. Let’s focus on

three of them:

 Intangibility

[in,tænkʒə'biləti]

. 无形的

Manufacturers produce tangible products—things that can be touched or handled, such as

automobiles and appliances. Service companies provide intangible products, such as banking,

entertainment, or education.

 Customization. 客户化

Manufactured goods are generally standardized; one twelve-ounce bottle of Pepsi

['pepsi] 百

事可乐

is the same as any other twelve-ounce bottle of Pepsi. Services, by contrast, are often

customized to satisfy the specific needs of a customer. When you go to the barber（理发店）

（

Shaolin Temple光头(bare-headed) baldies

）or the hairdresser, you ask for a haircut that looks

good on you because of the shape of your face and the texture of your hair. When you go to the

dentist, you ask him or her to fill or pull the tooth that’s bothering you.

 Customer contact. 顾客接触，顾客联系

You could spend your entire working life assembling cars in Detroit and never meet a

customer who bought a car that you helped to make. But if you were a waitress, you’d interact

with customers every day. In fact, their satisfaction with your product would be determined in part

by the service that you provided. Unlike manufactured goods, many services are bought and

consumed at the same time.

扩展：

extending the issue of

Customer contact.

二、the nature of services

The customer is (or should be ) the focal point of all decisions and actions of service

organization.顾客是（应该是）服务型组织所有决策和行动的着眼点。From this view, the

organization exists to serve the customer, and the systems and the employees exist to facilitate the

process of service.

Some suggest that the service organization also exists to serve the workforce because they

generally determine how the service is perceived by the customers.（换句话说，他们认为管理层

怎么对待员工，员工就会怎样对待客户）

The service triangle: The customer, the service strategy, support systems, employees

三、

Operations Planning

When starting or expanding operations, businesses in the service sector must make a number of

decisions quite similar to those made by manufacturers:

 What services (and perhaps what goods) should they offer?

 How will they provide these services?(operation process)

 Where will they locate their business, and what will their facilities look like?（site selection）

 How will they forecast demand for their services?

Let’s see how service firms answer questions such as these

1. （What services (and perhaps what goods) should they offer?）Service organizations succeed by

providing services that satisfy customers’ needs.

Companies that provide transportation, such as airlines, have to get customers to their

destinations as quickly and safely as possible.

Companies that deliver packages, such as FedEx（联邦快递）, must pick up, sort, and deliver

packages in a timely manner（及时）.

Colleges must provide quality educations. Companies that provide both services and goods,

such as Domino’s Pizza（达美乐的披萨）, have a dual challenge: they must produce a quality good

and deliver it satisfactorily.

2. How will they provide these services?(operation process)

There are three kinds of approaches.

(1) the production-line approach生产线法

Theodore Levitt notes, it treats the delivery of fast food as a manufacturing process rather

than a service process.他认为快餐食品的传送是一个制作过程而不是服务过程。Thus in

manufacturing and at McDonald’s, “the orientation is toward the efficient production of results not

on the attendance on others”.在制造业和麦当劳公司里，“以有效的产出为导向，不关注其他

事物”。

例如：

The McDonald’s French fryer allows cooking of the optimum number of French fries at one

time. 麦当劳炸一锅法国薯条的数量是最优的

A wide-mouthed scoop is used to pick up the precise amount of French fries for each order

size. (The employee never touches the product)用一把宽口的铲子盛取精确数量的法国薯条（雇

员从不直接接触产品）

（2）the self-service approach自主服务法

In contrast to the production-line approach, ck propose that the service process

can be enhanced by having the customer take a greater role in the production of the service.与生

产线法不同，洛夫洛克提出可以让顾客在服务过程中发挥更大的作用。

Company website, Automatic teller machines (ATM), self-serve gas station, e-ticket.

(3) the personal-attention approach 个体维护法

This is a face to face with total customization service. 这是一种面对面的定制服务。

例如：At Nordstrom，a rather loose, unstructured process relies on developing a relationship

between the individual salesperson and the customer.诺德斯特龙百货公司的服务流程相当松

散，并且是非结构化的，完全依靠改进销售人员和顾客间关系。

At the Ritz-Carlton, the process is virtually scripted, and the information system rather than the

employee keeps track of the guest’s (customer’s) personal preferences.在丽嘉酒店，服务流程实

际上形同虚设，它是由信息系统而不是雇员来记录顾客的个人偏好。

3. Where will they locate their business, and what will their facilities look like?

People in the real estate industry often say that the three most important factors to consider

when you’re buying a home are location, location, location. 在房地产工作的员工常说，决定你

买房的三个最重要因素就是：location

The same principle applies when you’re trying to locate a service business. To be successful

in a service industry, you need to be accessible （易接近的）to your customers. Some service

businesses, such as cable-TV providers（有线电视从业者）, package-delivery services, and

e-retailers, go to their customers. Many others, however—hotels, restaurants, stores, hospitals, and

airports—have to attract customers to their facilities. These businesses must locate where there’s a

high volume of available customers. Let’s see how BK decides where to place a restaurant.

Burger King是美国最大的fastfood连锁之一，和Mc和KFC号称三巨头。

In picking a location, BK planners perform a detailed analysis of demographics and traffic

patterns, yet the most important factor is usually traffic count—the number of cars or people that

pass by a specific location in the course of a day.

In the United States, where we travel almost everywhere by car, BK looks for busy

intersections, interstate interchanges with easy off and on ramps, or such “primary destinations” as

shopping malls, tourist attractions, downtown business areas, or movie theaters. In Europe, where

public transportation is much more common, planners focus on subway, train, bus, and trolley

stops.

demographics 人口统计资料 Intersections 交叉点interstate 州际公路

Once planners find a site with an acceptable traffic count, they apply other criteria. It must,

for example, be easy for vehicles to enter and exit the site, which must also provide enough

parking to handle projected dine-in business. Local zoning must permit standard signage,

especially along interstate highways. Finally, expected business must be high enough to justify the

cost of the land and building.

Signage 引导标志

4． How will they forecast demand for their services?

（1）Capacity Planning

Estimating capacity needs for a service business isn’t the same thing as estimating those of a

manufacturer. A manufacturer can predict overall demand, produce the product, store it in

inventory, and ship it to a customer when it’s ordered. Service providers, however, can’t store

their products for later use: hairdressers can’t “inventory” haircuts, hospitals can’t

“inventory” operations, and amusement parks can’t “inventory” roller-coaster rides. Service

firms have to build sufficient capacity to satisfy customers’ needs on an “as-demanded” basis.

Like manufacturers, service providers must consider many variables when estimating demand and

capacity:

 How many customers will I have?

 When will they want my services (which days of the week, which times of the day)?

 How long will it take to serve each customer?

 How will external factors, such as weather or holidays, affect the demand for my services?

Forecasting demand is easier for companies like BK, which has a long history of planning

facilities, than for brand-new service businesses. BK can predict sales for a new restaurant by

combining its knowledge of customer-service patterns at existing restaurants with information

collected about each new location, including the number of cars or people passing the proposed

site and the effect of nearby competition.

（2）Managing Operations

Overseeing a service organization puts special demands on managers, especially those

running firms, such as hotels, retail stores, and restaurants, that have a high degree of

contact with customers. Service firms provide customers with personal attention and must satisfy

their needs in a timely manner. This task is complicated by the fact that demand can vary greatly

over the course of any given day. Managers, therefore, must pay particular attention to employee

work schedules and (in some cases) inventory management. Let’s see how BK deals with these

problems.

Scheduling

In manufacturing, managers focus on scheduling the activities needed to transform raw

materials into finished goods. In service organizations, they focus on scheduling workers so

that they’re available to handle fluctuating customer demand. Each week, therefore, every BK

store manager schedules employees to cover not only the peak periods of breakfast, lunch, and

dinner, but also the slower periods in between. If he or she staffs too many people, labor cost per

sales dollar will be too high. If there aren’t enough employees, customers have to wait in lines.

Some get discouraged, and even leave, and many may never come back.

Inventory Control

Businesses that provide both goods and services, such as retail stores and auto-repair shops,

have the same inventory-control problems as manufacturers: keeping levels too high costs

money, while running out of inventory costs sales. Technology, such as the point-of-sale

registers used at BK, makes the job easier. BK’s system tracks everything sold during a given time

and lets each store manager know how much of everything should be kept in inventory. It also

makes it possible to count the number of burgers and buns, bags and racks of fries, and boxes of

beverage mixes at the beginning or end of each shift. Because there are fixed numbers of

supplies—say, beef patties or bags of fries—in each box, employees simply count boxes and

multiply. In just a few minutes, the manager knows whether the inventory is correct (and should

be able to see if any theft has occurred on the shift).