Measurement of Multiple Sites in Service Firms With Data Envelopment Analysis

Metters, Richard; Frei, Frances X.; Vargas, Vicente

doi:10.1111/j.1937-5956.1999.tb00308.x

Cited by 38 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Second, can we develop reasonable objective measures (e.g., Soteriou and Chase 1998) or must we rely on subjective means for measuring customer inputs? Measuring inputs consistently from one service environment to another has been a persistent challenge (Metters, Frei, and Vargas 1999). As an example, Silvestro et al (1992) proposes classifying services according to the number of customers processed per service unit per day.…”

Section: Conclusion and Research Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foundations and Implications of a Proposed Unified Services Theory

Sampson

Froehle

2006

Production and Operations Management

565

456

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Diverse businesses, such as garbage collection, retail banking, and management consulting are often tied together under the heading of "services", based on little more than a perception that they are intangible and do not manufacture anything. Such definitions inadequately identify managerial and operational implications common among, and unique to, services. We present a "Unified Services Theory" (UST) to clearly delineate service processes from non-service processes and to identify key commonalities across seemingly disparate service businesses. The UST defines a service production process as one that relies on customer inputs; customers act as suppliers for all service processes. Non-services (such as make-to-stock manufacturing) rely on customer selection of outputs, payment for outputs, and occasional feedback, but production is not dependent upon inputs from individual customers. The UST reveals principles that are common to the wide range of services and provides a unifying foundation for various theories and models of service operations, such as the traditional "characteristics of services" and Customer Contact Theory. The UST has significant operational corollaries pertaining to capacity and demand management, service quality, services strategy, and so forth. The UST provides a common reference point to which services management researchers can anchor future theory-building and theory-testing research.

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Section: Conclusion and Research Opportunitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foundations and Implications of a Proposed Unified Services Theory

Sampson

Froehle

2006

Production and Operations Management

565

456

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“…The study first employs data envelopment analysis (DEA; Stage 1) to compute a measure of IT productivity and then uses this measure as a dependent variable in a multivariate regression analysis (Stage 2). Several researchers have argued that DEA-derived results may be ideally used as dependents variables in regression analysis (Epstein and Henderson 1989;Mahmood et al 1996;Metters et al 1999). We elaborate on this next.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

An empirical study of IT as a factor of production: The case of Net-enabled IT assets

2008

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A great deal of research in the information systems field has focused on the link between IT and firm-level outputs, like productivity and performance. This paper critically examines the economic assumptions and methodological approaches that underlie much of this work. Three important issues and gaps are identified. First, the functional form of the relationship between IT and firmlevel outputs has been inconsistently specified, or overlooked. Second, multiple input and output variables are often arbitrarily combined. Third, the characteristics of IT as a factor of production have not been tested in the era of Net-enabled IT assets. This paper sheds light on these issues by analyzing an appropriate dataset in a two-stage process. In the first stage, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed in order to derive a meaningful measure for IT productivity from a compilation of input and output variables. This measure is treated as a dependent variable in a multivariate regression analysis during the second stage. The paper confirms the diminishing marginal productivity and input substitutability of IT for the subcategory of Net-enabled IT assets.

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“…Service quality is a commonly used output measure in other service industries including banking (Roth and Jackson, 1995;Soteriou and Stavrinides, 1997;Soteriou and Zenios, 1999;Metters et al, 1999;Kamakura et al, 2002;Sherman and Zhu, 2006a), marketing (Parasuraman, 2002;Ayanso and Mokaya, 2013), information systems (Becker et al, 2011), maintenance (Backhaus et al, 2011), hotels (Yilmaz and Bititci, 2006), and airport operations (Adler and Berechman, 2001). Soteriou and Zenios (1999) study how the operational characteristics of services translate into customers' perception of quality.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Critical Evaluation of U.S. Airlines’ Service Quality Performance: Lower Costs vs. Satisfied Customers

Yayla‐Küllü

Tansitpong²

2013

JMS

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Providing good quality services enables airlines to retain customer satisfaction, loyalty, market-share, and ultimately profitability. However, U.S. airlines compete primarily on price and are not known for good quality service. There have been a growing number of low-cost airlines. In such a business landscape, we study whether a full-service carrier indeed outperforms a low-cost carrier in terms of service quality when we control for the operational costs. We are also interested to find out which dimensions of service quality have the greatest potential for improvement and how these potential improvement areas differ for low-cost and full-service carriers. We contribute to the service operations literature that looks at efficiency by incorporating customer service quality outputs which has never been done before for the airline industry. We find that major airlines in the industry are lacking staff enthusiasm, adequate cabin presence, and behavioral consistency. Moreover, 33.3% of firms need to deliver more comfortable seats, better meals, in-flight entertainment, and cleaner surroundings. On the other hand, notably, U.S. airlines are operating quite efficiently when it comes to service supply chain quality. We also provide managerial guidelines for U.S. airlines to improve their service quality and overall customer satisfaction.

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Measurement of Multiple Sites in Service Firms With Data Envelopment Analysis

Cited by 38 publications

References 41 publications

Foundations and Implications of a Proposed Unified Services Theory

Foundations and Implications of a Proposed Unified Services Theory

An empirical study of IT as a factor of production: The case of Net-enabled IT assets

A Critical Evaluation of U.S. Airlines’ Service Quality Performance: Lower Costs vs. Satisfied Customers

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