Operations & Info Management 305 - Service Industry Operations

The service industry accounts for about 75% of the US employment and almost 60% of all personal consumption. This course will explore the service industries (e.g., transportation, health care, retailing, restaurants, and financial services) with a view toward developing models that allow planners to reduce costs and enhance customer service. Topics to be covered include customer service quality, facility location planning for services (e.g., retail stores, hospitals, fire stations, and repair facilities), resource allocation problems, inventory management issues in the service sector, workforce planning and scheduling, yield and demand management, queueing analysis and design of service systems, vehicle routing in the service industries, and global logistics concepts such as international shipping. In addition to learning about the service industry, the course will introduce students to the non-textbook literature. Some of the course will be based on case studies that are published in journals, and/or documented in Interfaces, the Harvard Business Review etc. Students will be exposed to a number of papers in the literature spanning a variety of problems in the service sector and a number of different industries.

This class is open to BBA-OIM majors only.