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IEMS 383: Service Engineering and Management


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Prerequisites

IEMS-315; IEMS-313 or IEMS-310

Description

Students will explore service industries: cost-reduction and service-enhancement models, location planning, workforce scheduling, yield management, queuing analysis and call-center management. 

  • This course is an IE/OR elective for Industrial Engineering. It can also be used to satisfy the Production & Logistics requirement for the major.

 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  • Students will understand the differences between service and manufacturing environments
  • Students will learn the different types of service systems based on customer interactions
  • Students will learn qualitative and quantitative methods to find good locations for service systems
  • Students will learn how to manage and schedule large projects
  • Students will learn the levers to reduce waiting times in service systems
  • Students will learn basic principles of pricing goods and services
  • Student will learn capacity allocation and network management methods of revenue management

TOPICS 

  • Understanding services, their value propositions, and customer encounter
  • Factors affecting service location decisions.
  • Analytical models of locations (factor weighting models, single- and multiple-facility location models on continuous and discrete space)
  • Project management (CPM, PERT, resource allocation, crashing projects)
  • Queueing models of services (finite and infinite population Markovian queues, non-Markovian queues, queues with priority)
  • Managing and scheduling workforce in call centers
  • Service quality and service failure recovery
  • Principle of pricing (customer reservation price and price response function, first-, second-, and third-degree price discrimination, markdown pricing, pure and mix bundling).
  • Revenue management (capacity allocation, overbooking, and network management)

MATERIALS

  • Lecture notes will be posted online
  • Service Management: Operations, Strategy and Information Technology, Eight Edition, by Fitzsimmons, J. A. and M. J. Fitzsimmons, 2014, Irwin/McGraw Hill, Boston. ISBN: 9780070615663 (Required)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

This course explores Service Industries (e.g., transportation, health care, retailing, airlines, hotels, emergency services, call centers) with a view toward developing models that allow managers to reduce costs, increase revenue, and enhance customer service.