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 need for productivity excellence has led service organization managers to use benchmarking techniques to identify and adopt best practices in their organizations. Benchmarking has enabled service organizations to continuously improve by allowing service units to learn from methods that prove the most efficient and effective. >Service Productivity Management is an in-depth guide to using the most powerful available benchmarking technique to improve service organization performance - Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The underlying concepts that drive DEA and enable it to increase productivity and profitability of service organizations are explained in non-technical language. It describes how DEA: (1) Identifies best practice service units; (2) Exposes high cost inefficient service units; (3) Identifies specific changes to each service unit to elevateperformance to the best practice level that provides high quality service at low cost; and most important, (4) Guides the improvement process. Use of basic and advanced DEA methods are all supported by case-study applications of organizations that have successfully improved their performance. The techniques discussed in the book are accessible to all managers with access to Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet software (Excel). The book provides step-by-step guidance to enable the reader to apply DEA and Excel software to their organization. DEAFrontier is a Microsoft® Excel Add-in designed to run DEA analyses on any set of organizations of interest to the reader. For a free trial version of the DEAFrontier software, please visit www. deafrontier. com.