A heightened awareness of the fundamental behavioral science principles underlying human interactions can be translated directly into service design. Service encounter design can be approached with the same depth and rigor found in goods production. Service encounters can be designed to enhance the customer's experience during the process and their recollection of the process after it is completed. This paper summarizes the key concepts from a panel discussion at the DSI National Meeting in Orlando in November 2000. The panel brought together a number of leading academic researchers to investigate current research questions relating to the human side of the design, development and deployment of new service technologies. Human issues from the customer and service provider vantage are illustrated and challenges to researchers for exploring this perspective are presented.
We consider a situation in which the manufacturing system is equipped with batch and discrete processors. Each batch processor can process a batch (limited number) of jobs simultaneously. Once the process begins, no job can be released from the batch processor until the entire batch is processed. In this paper, we analyze a class of two-machine batching and scheduling problems in which the batch processor plays an important role. Specifically, we consider two performance measures: the makespan and the sum of job completion times. We analyze the complexity of this class of problems, present polynomial procedures for some problems, propose a heuristic, and establish an upper bound on the worst case performance ratio of the heuristic for the NP-complete problem. In addition, we extend our analysis to the case of multiple families and to the case of three-machine batching.
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