Introduction The Service Quality and Productivity Challenge

Abstract

The popular press is awash these days over the recent world-wide recession and the impact of manufacturing on economic development. However, a few enlightened articles (e.g.,The Economist 1992a, 1992b) have appeared that challenge the conventional wisdom that only manufacturing matters, an idea popularized in the book Made in America (Dertouzos, Lester, and Solow 1989). All developed economies are service-based economies and, as will be discussed below, the cause of our movement toward service-based economies is not a crisis! The true crisis lies in the low productivity that plagues many service operations. Simple answers, unfortunately, do not exist for this problem.