RESEARCH AT ISSER

At ISSER we are trying to connect the research areas commonly related to service operations to provide a comprehensive holistic and integrated evaluation of the service delivery system or service delivery design. Using  systems thinking, systems dynamics together with analytical ways to measure performance and establish targets can open doors to a new design paradigm for service operations.

Background

Different research areas concentrating in the engineering of service delivery systems have grown in the last two decades. Research on queuing systems (e.g. Li and Lee ,  1994); optimal price and capacity decisions (e.g. Stidham, 1992), competition models (e.g. Ilmakunnas, 2002)  and congestion models for service facilities (e.g. Reitman, 1991) are usually not linked to a more holistic research approach on the real determinants of service delivery systems’ performance in different international contexts (e.g. Forbes and Lynn, 2005), or to research on customer relationships and marketing strategies influencing service system design (e.g. Sisodia, 1992) or customer decision processes influencing purchasing behavior, as it is the case of studies of tourist decision making processes (e.g.  Nicolau and Más, 2005).

Theory building research that connects customer behavior, and cultural context to service quality and to profits is another area of great development. Frameworks offered as tools in developing an operations strategy and service system design, as well as a diagnostic tool for examining the causes of poor service quality and low customer satisfaction are beginning to emerge (e.g. Sung-eui, 2005, Heskett et al )

Systems integration, systems thinking and systems dynamics have also proven to be  important tools in the development of service systems that consider different growth and business strategies and different business or government policies (e.g. Dutta, 2001, Lai et al, 2001; Oliva et al, 2003, Pasupathy, 2006 ).

Seven areas of research transpire:

• Behavioral, human and economic aspects of service delivery
• Systems thinking and system dynamics in service engineering
• Survey research
• Performance measurement systems, including service quality and customer satisfaction using DEA
• Knowledge discovery, data mining and predictive analytics
• Complexity and cognition in engineering education

RESEARCH GOALS

• To understand service and the service provider so that a theory of services can be created similar to the theory of production for manufactured goods
• To use state-of-the-art tools and techniques to find optimal solutions to complex service delivery system problems.
• To contribute to the knowledge of service quality and customer satisfaction, customer behavior
• To uncover knowledge from data to inform system design decisions and to model the new knowledge into the dynamics of the system, so that consequences of proposed policies, restructuring changes, investments, budget policies or otherwise modifications to current systems can be foreseen and evaluated a priori.
• To collect, use and transform service delivery and exogenous data into useful information for decision making, taking data analysis to the next level of business intelligence for the continuous improvement of service delivery systems.
• To understand how human cognition works when facing dynamic and complex problems and systems.

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