ABSTRACT
Operations Management (OM) is the study of how goods get manufactured and service gets delivered. Originally, it was founded on studies of how best to organize factories manufacturing automobiles and other consumer goods. But from the 1970s onwards, a greater emphasis was placed on understanding service operations. A seminal contribution to this was the publication of The Management of Service Operations (Sasser et al. 1978) by three distinguished Harvard professors. This book recognized that service firms were playing a greater and greater role in a nation’s economic activity and suggested that managing such firms and their operations may be different to practice in manufacturing – an issue we explore later in this chapter.
