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.

The management of new service development (NSD) has become an important competitive concern in many service industries. However, NSD remains among the least studied and understood topics in the service management literature. As a result, our current understanding of the critical resources and activities to develop new services is inadequate given NSD’s importance as a service competitiveness driver. Until recently, the generally accepted principle behind NSD was that “new services happen” rather than occurring through formal development processes. Recent efforts to address this debate have been inconclusive. Thus, additional research is needed to validate or discredit the belief that new services happen as a result of intuition, flair, and luck. Relying upon the general distinctions between research exploitation and exploration, this paper describes areas in NSD research that deserve further leveraging and refinement (i.e. exploitation) and identifies areas requiring discovery or new study (i.e. exploration). We discuss the critical substantive and research design issues facing NSD scholars such as defining new services, choice in focusing on the NSD process or performance (or both), and specification of unit of analysis. We also examine what can be exploited from the study of new product development to further understanding of NSD. Finally, we explore one important area for future NSD research exploration: the impact of the Internet on the design and development of services. We offer research opportunities and research challenges in the study of NSD throughout the paper.

Supply chains are quite easy to define for manufacturing organizations where each participant in the chain receives inputs from a set of suppliers, processes those inputs, and delivers them to a distinct set of customers. With service organizations, one of the primary suppliers of process inputs is customers themselves, who provide their bodies, minds, belongings, or information as inputs to the service processes. We refer to this concept of customers being suppliers as`c ustomer-supplier duality.'' The duality implies that service supply chains are bidirectional, which is that production flows in both directions. This article explores the customer-supplier duality as it pertains to supply chain management, including practical and managerial implications.

Service operations management (SOM) has a rich history of important but not widely recognized contributions to research and practice. There also seems to be some uncertainty about how SOM fits in the broader fields of operations management and service management. This article addresses those concerns by introducing a visual framework called Process-Chain-Network (PCN) Analysis. The framework is built upon PCN Diagrams that depict processes and interactions involving networks of entities. PCN Analysis includes identifying the value proposition of a given process network, assessing performance characteristics and value propositions of a process configuration, and identifying opportunities for process improvement and innovation. The PCN framework clarifies fundamental concepts of SOM, demonstrates how SOM fits in broader contexts of business management, illuminates managerial insights of SOM and related disciplines, and provides a basis for future SOM research.

Services and products possess various attributes, some being more important than others. Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is a technique for prioritising attributes based on measurements of performance and importance. A weakness of IPA is that it conceptualises attribute importance as a scalar which is independent of attribute performance. In this article we theorise that importance is not adequately represented as a point estimate, but is a function of performance. When attribute performance changes, importance does also, which can change the relative priority of subsequent improvement efforts. Empirical results are presented which support our theory, The nature of the performance-importance response function is discussed, along with implications. Ideas for future research are also discussed, including application of the findings to quality modelling (SERVQUAL) and other decision support methodologies (Quality Function Deployment and the Analytic Hierarchy Process).