Showing papers on "Service system published in 1985"

Consumer Participation and Productivity in Service Operations

Abstract: Operations managers have traditionally increased productivity by substituting machines for labor, simplifying work, and devising employee incentive plans. For services, the consumer represents an untapped productive resource. A service delivery system can be designed to permit greater consumer involvement in the production process thereby achieving productivity gains and revising the concept of employment.

Optimal 2-facility network districting in the presence of queuing

Abstract: This paper considers a districting problem for a demand-responsive service system in which queuing is allowed. Customers, located at the nodes of a transportation network, call in a Poisson manner, asking for on-scene service by a mobile service unit. Two such units service the entire network, with unit i(i = 1, 2) responsible for all nodes Ni in its unique “service territory.” In response to a call from within Ni, unit i, if available, is dispatched immediately to the customer; if the unit is busy with a previous customer, the call is dispatched in a FIFO manner. Each service territory, with its response unit, behaves as an independently operating M/G/1 queuing system. The problem addressed in this paper is determination of the optimal service territories, given fixed home locations for each of the service units, so as to minimize the average response time (queuing delay plus travel time) to a random customer. Exact results are obtained for limiting values of demand rate, and efficient heuristics are pre...

Monitoring and Control in Service Operations

Abstract: Service organisations do not always manage those items which affect customer satisfaction to the same level as manufacturing organisations, which indicates a possible mismatch between what customers think they are buying and what service organisations seem to be providing. Efficiency is certainly needed but too much emphasis on efficiency may be dysfunctional if it leads to over‐standardisation, or emphasis on the product at the expense of the process, when the customers think they are buying process elements. Effectiveness could be better achieved by emphasis on the processes rather than by trying to become more “product‐orientated”.

Multi-Agent Customer Allocation in a Stochastic Service System

Abstract: In many service systems, customers interact with an agent who directs customers to specific service facilities. Each agent, as a decision maker, seeks to allocate his/her customers to the service centers so as to optimize a measure of performance based on the customers' expected waiting time and the expected number of customers in service. In this paper, the problem of multiple agents, each optimizing his/her customer allocation decision in a stochastic service system, is analyzed as a noncooperative game. It is shown that an equilibrium point to such a game exists and sufficient conditions for which this equilibrium point is unique are also given. Finally, the relative efficiency of the multi-agent system is examined by comparing the customers' average waiting time in the multi-agent system to the one-agent case. It is shown that, in general, the multi-agent system is not as efficient as the one-agent one in terms of customer welfare.

Distributed Name Servers: Naming and Caching in Large Distributed

Abstract: Name services facilitate sharing in distributed environments by allowing objects to be named unambiguously and maintaining a set of application-defined attributes for each named object. Existing distributed name services, which manage names based on their syntactic structure, may lack the flexibility needed by large, diverse, and evolving computing communities. A new approach, structure-free name management, separates three activities: choosing names, selecting the storage sites for object attributes, and resolving an object''s name to its attributes. Administrative entities apportion the responsibility for managing various names, while the name service''s information needed to locate an object''s attributes can be independently reconfigured to improve performance or meet changing demands. An analytical performance model for distributed name services provides assessments of the effect of various design and configuration choices on the cost of name service operations. Measurements of Xerox''s Grapevine registration service are used as inputs to the model to demonstrate the benefits of replicating an object''s attributes to coincide with sizeable localities of interest. Additional performance benefits result from client''s acquiring local caches of name service data treated as hints. A cache management strategy that maintains a minimum level of cache accuracy is shown to be more effective than the usual technique of maximizing the hit ratio; cache managers can guarantee reduced overall response times, even though clients must occasionally recover from outdated cache data.

Distributed name servers: naming and caching in large distributed computing environments

Abstract: : Name services facilitate sharing in distributed environments by allowing objects to be named unambiguously and maintaining a set of application- defined attributes for each named object. Existing distributed name services, which manage names based on their syntactic structure, may lack the flexibility needed by large, diverse, and evolving computing communities. A new approach, structure-free name management, separates three activities; choosing names, selecting the storage sites for object attributes, and resolving an object's name to its attributes. Administrative entities apportion the responsibility for managing various names, while the name service's information needed to locate an object's attributes can be independently reconfigured to improve performance or meet changing demands. An analytical performance model for distributed name services provides assessments of the effect of various design and configuration choices on the cost of name service operations. Measurements of Xerox's Grapevine registration service are used as inputs to the model to demonstrate the benefits of replicating an object's attributes to coincide with sizeable localities of interest. Additional performance benefits result from client's acquiring local caches of name service data treated as hints. A cache management strategy that maintains a minimum leval of cache accuracy is shown to be more effective than the usual technique of maximizing the hit ratio.

Dismantling the community-based service system.

Abstract: As a result of the community-based human services movement in the 1960s and 1970s, massive numbers of dependent people moved out of large-scale institutions and returned to community life. Clients and their support services concentrated in inner cities, forming “service-dependent population ghettos” there. Recently, however, new urban economic development patterns, local land use policies that limit housing supply, and reductions in funds for social programs have begun to dismantle the service-dependent population ghettos in some cities. These changes may force dependent clients back into institutions, into service settings that do not suit their needs, or onto the streets. Using a case study of Santa Clara County, California, this article describes the forces that contributed to development, and now to decline, of the service-dependent population ghetto there. The authors argue that planners and policymakers need to address the problems of service-dependent groups before those problems worsen. P...

The 10 Commandments of Service System Management

Abstract: There is no need to recount the statistics relating to service system growth or the frequent calls to utilize productivity as a strategic variable. These issues are well understood—services are the most rapidly growing of our economic sectors, and there is plenty of effort being devoted to studying ways of improving their productivity. What is needed, in my opinion, is a better understanding of the very nature of services themselves, and more specifically, some practical philosophy for designing the service delivery process. These two related issues can be addressed by 10 “commandments” gleaned from my 10 years of studying services, my recent research on branch banking, and a lifetime of living with services as a consumer. In order to provide some structure to an admittedly idiosyncratic list, the commandments are grouped under the following headings: The Facility, The Customer, and The Server. (In reading the list and explanations, please assume that the normal academic caveats such as “other things bein...

Federal Efforts to Improve Mental Health Services for Children: Breaking the Cycle of Failure

Abstract: This article describes the recently implemented Child and Adolescent Service System Program (CASSP). This program, administered by the National Institute of Mental Health, is the latest federal effort to address the provision of mental health services to children and adolescents through grants to states to improve service systems at the state and local level. The article traces the history of federal initiatives for children's mental health services, a history marked by a series of failures. Drawing from the lessons of the past failures as well as the successful effort to create CASSP, implications for the survival of CASSP and future federal initiatives are presented.

Operations Management in Service Industries and the Public Sector: Text and Cases

Abstract: Introduction to Service Operations. Design of Service Operations. Managing the Workforce. Capacity Mangagement. Operations Control. Quality Management. Field Service Management. Queue Systems Design Management. Material Management. Site Locaton. Operations Strategy and the Multi-Site Life Cycle. Index.

The Optimal Look-Ahead Policy for Admission to a Single Server System

Abstract: This paper considers a service system with a single server, finite waiting room, and a renewal arrival process. Customers who arrive while the server is busy are lost. Upon completing service, the server chooses between two actions: either he immediately starts a new service, provided a customer is present, or he admits the newly arrived customer to the system, but delays service pending the next arrival, whereupon he again chooses between these two actions. This process continues until either the system is full or a new service is started. Once a service has been started, all customers who arrive while the server is busy are lost. We assume that at each decision epoch the server knows the arrival epoch of the first arriving customer. We show that there exists an optimal control-limit policy that minimizes the average expected idle time per customer served equivalently, maximizes the average number of customers served per unit of time. The special case of Poisson arrivals leads to an explicit expression for this delay that generalizes exisiting results.

The community residential treatment service: developing a continuum of prosthetic environments for the chronically disabled.

Abstract: Among the many issues regarding the care of chronic mental patients, none is more pressing than the need for administrative and clinical models designed to organize and systematize the efforts of diverse community service providers. This paper describes the functioning of the Community Residential Treatment Service of the South Beach Psychiatric Center, a large-scale project of a state facility created to respond to this tissue. By blending sophisticated clinical and administrative technology, programs operated by the state, voluntary, and proprietary health care sectors have been integrated to form a balanced service delivery system. This system provides a broad continuum of inpatient and outpatient residential settings developed in accordance with social learning principles. The components of the system, with the Community Residential Treatment Service as the major integrative force, are linked together by detailed contracts as well as common behavioral clinical and behavioral administrative language. The treatment successes f this system have been significant enough to suggest that a positive synergistic effect is generated by this programming combination.

Capacity planning in service operations: the case of hospital outpatient facilities.

Abstract: This paper presents models that may be used to balance service capacity and demand in situations in which demand is external and, therefore, is not fixed but may fluctuate in response to factors that include the waiting time imposed upon customers. Such situations are common in retailing, financial services, health services, and other service sector industries. An application is shown to a hospital outpatient facility.

Consultation and education in community mental health: a historical analysis.

Abstract: A historical analysis of consultation and education services within community mental health centers is presented with a focus on the two major tasks that these services were intended to address:prevention andcommunity service system enhancement. This analysis begins with events that shaped the development of the initial community mental health center (CMHC) legislation, then examines key factors that influenced the nature and scope of consultation and education services as the federal CMHC program was implemented, and ends with a look at the changes that have occurred in these services since block grant funding was instituted. Throughout the analysis, central problems are discussed that have seriously hindered the development of viable consultation and education programs, and key policy, definitional and organizational issues are identified that must be addressed if these services are to become a meaningful component of the mental health service system.

Allocation of Servers for Stochastic Service Stations with One Overflow Station

Abstract: As one of its services, the Bell System provides microwave and cable transmission equipment for the transmission of news, sports and special-event TV programs from sites that do not have permanent transmission facilities. This paper describes a model for determining quantities of this TV equipment for service stations located throughout the country. This is actually a fundamental model for allocating servers equipment in our case for a stochastic service system consisting of several multiserver stations with one multiserver overflow station. The flows of customers to the initial stations are independent Poisson processes, and if a customer arrives at a station when all of its servers are busy, it is either served at the overflow station or denied service, depending on whether an overflow-server is available or not. The service times are exponential random variables. There are holding costs for having the servers in the system and costs for the services, depending on where they are done. We present a myopic nonlinear programming algorithm that finds numbers of servers for the stations that serve a desired percentage of customers at near-minimum cost. As part of our analysis, we show how Hayward's and Wilkinson's approximations for the blocking probability at the overflow station extend to heterogeneous service rates.

Accumulating communication service system

Abstract: PURPOSE:To effectively use an accumulating device in a communication processing node, by providing an accumulation controlling device which selects the most suitable communication processing node for accumulating service calls. CONSTITUTION:An accumulation controlling device 6 to be connected with each communication processing node (CPN) 4 and each gate exchanger (GS) 3 for processing communication is provided. The accumulation controlling device 6 selects the most suitable CPN4 for accumulating accumulating service calls in accordance with the produced condition of accumulating communication service calls, arrangement of each CPN4 in this system, and using condition of accumulating devices in each CPN4. Therefore, the accumulating device in each CPN4 can be used edficiently.