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D.
Sherman and Joe
Zhu, Service Productivity Management: Improving Service Performance
Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)
Springer, Boston, 2006,
ISBN 0-387-33211-1
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The service economy is now the largest
portion of the
industrialized world's economic activity. This development has
dramatically
raised the importance of maximizing productivity excellence in service
organizations. The correlation between the service economy and
productivity
excellence has lead service organization managers to recognize the
value of
using benchmarking techniques to identify and adopt best practices in
their
organizations. As the use of benchmarking metrics in service
organizations has
increased, correspondingly these organizations have improved
continuously by allowing
service units to learn from methods that prove the most effective.
Service Productivity Management
provides the insights
and methods to answers questions on a whole range of productivity
issues, of
which some examples are: How do you manage profitability of a network
of
hundreds or thousands of branch offices disbursed over several states
and
countries? How can managed-care organizations manage the quality and
cost of
hundreds of physicians providing health services to millions of plan
members?
What methods would enable a government to ensure that the multiple
offices
serving citizens across a country are operating at low cost while
meeting the
required service quality? Each of these service settings are examples
of the
many service providers that deliver a complex set of services to a
widely
diversified set of customers. The book systematically explores complex
service
issues and analyzes each case for a variety of ways to improve service
productivity, quality, and profitability.
Service Productivity Management is an
in-depth guide
to using the most powerful available benchmarking technique to improve
service
organization performance — Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). (1) It
outlines the
use of DEA as a benchmarking technique. (2) It identifies high costs
service
units. (3) It isolates specific changes to each service unit to elevate
their
performance to the best practice services level providing high quality
service
at low cost. (4) And most important, it guides the improvement process.
The
discussion and methods are all supported by case-study applications to
organizations that have sought and have successfully improved its
performance.
The techniques discussed in the book are accessible to any and all
managers
with access to Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet software (Excel).
Throughout the
book, step-by-step guidance is provided to enable any reader to apply
DEA and
the Excel software to their organization. Packaged with the book comes
a
ready-to-use DEA software CD for Microsoft® Excel Add-in to run DEA
analyses on
any set of organizations of interest to the reader.
It includes the following DEA models
- Envelopment Model
- Multiplier Model (with Epsilon)
- Restricted Multipliers (AR/Cone Ratio Model)
- Slack-based Model
- Measure Specific Model (Uncontrollable factors)
- Returns to Scale Estimation
The included
software works under Excel 97, 2000 and 2003, and does not work under
Excel 2007.
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