Here is an in-depth guide to the most powerful available benchmarking technique for improving service organization performance — Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The book outlines DEA as a benchmarking technique, identifies high cost service units, isolates specific changes for elevating performance to the best practice services level providing high quality service at low cost and most important, it guides the improvement process.

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The conference committee encourages contributions on this wide range of topics through the use of a variety of rigorous approaches, including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative and critical methods. Action-based research, case studies and work-in-progress/posters are enthusiastically welcomed. PhD research, proposals for roundtable discussions, practitioner contributions and product demonstrations based on the conference themes are also invited.

3 While all of these explanations seem to have merit, there is one dominant reason why the percentage of GDP and employment dedicated to services has continued to increase: low productivity. According to Baumol's cost disease hypothesis (Baumol, Blackman, and Wolff 1991), the growth in services is actually an illusion. The fact is that service-sector productivity is improving slower than that of manufacturing and thus, it seems as if we are consuming more services in nominal terms. However, in real terms, we are consuming slightly less services. That is, the increase in the service sector is caused by low productivity relative to manufacturing. The implication of Baumol's cost disease is the following. Assuming historical productivity increases for manufacturing, agriCUlture, education and health care, Baumol (1992) shows that the U. S. can triple its output in all sectors within 50 years. However, due to the higher productivity level for manufacturing and agriculture, it will take substantially more employment in services to achieve this increase in output. To put this argument in perspective, simply roll back the clock 100 years or so and replace the words manufacturing with agriculture, and services with manufacturing. The phenomenal growth in agricultural productivity versus manufacturing caused the employment levels in agriculture in the U. S. to decrease rapidly while producing a truly unbelievable amount of food. It is the low productivity of services that is the real culprit in its growth of GDP and employment share.

This book demonstrates how to successfully manage and lead healthcare institutions by employing the logic of business model innovation to gain competitive advantages. Since clerk-like routines in professional organizations tend to overlook patient and service-centered healthcare solutions, it challenges the view that competition and collaboration in the healthcare sector should not only incorporate single-end services, therapies or diagnosis related groups. Moreover, the authors focus on holistic business models, which place greater emphasis on customer needs and put customers and patients first. The holistic business models approach addresses topics such as business operations, competitiveness, strategic business objectives, opportunities and threats, critical success factors and key performance indicators.The contributions cover various aspects of service business innovation such as reconfiguring the hospital business model in healthcare delivery, essential characteristics of service business model innovation in healthcare, guided business modeling and analysis for business professionals, patient-driven service delivery models in healthcare, and continuous and co-creative business model creation. All of the contributions introduce business models and strategies, process innovations, and toolkits that can be applied at the managerial level, ensuring the book will be of interest to healthcare professionals, hospital managers and consultants, as well as scholars, whose focus is on improving value-generating and competitive business architectures in the healthcare sector.

Poised to influence innovative management thinking into the 21st century, Total Productivity Management (TPmgt), written by one of the pioneers of productivity management, has been a decade in the making. This landmark publication is the most extensive book available on the subject of total productivity management. At a time when downsizing and layoffs are the norm, this innovative and highly organized book shows you how to treat human resource situations with a caring, customer-oriented, yet competitive attitude through integration of technical and human dimensions. This book makes use of a set of proven models and provides a systematic framework and structure to link total productivity to an organization's profitability. Total Productivity Management describes the tasks required of all constituents in an understandable format that they can relate to and by which regards can be realized for performance in all resource categories including direct labor, administrative staff, managers, professional personnel, materials, liquid assets, technologies, energy, and other areas.

Diving into the evolution of Customer Experience this text offers an insightful exploration of the paradigm shift from customer service to Customer Experience (CX) within the Caribbean context. Unveiling the dynamics of CX's influence on satisfaction, loyalty, and business profitability, this book delves into strategic planning, employee development, data-driven decisions, and emerging technological trends. Scholars and practitioners within customer service, services marketing, customer experience management and customer relationship marketing in the retail hospitality and tourism, financial, health care and education sectors will find this a valuable resource on CX's transformative power in this region and beyond.

The Fifth Edition provides graduate and pre-professional students with a comprehensive, detailed overview of the numerous facets of the modern healthcare system, focusing on functions and operations at both the corporate and hospital level. The Fifth Edition of this authoritative text comprises several new subjects, including new chapters on patient safety and ambulatory care center design and planning. Other updated topics include healthcare information systems, management of nursing systems, labor and employment law, and financial management, as well discussions on current healthcare policy in the United States. The Fifth Edition continues to be one of the most effective teaching texts in the field, addressing operational, technical and organizational matters along with the day-to-day responsibilities of hospital administrators. Broad in scope, this essential text has now evolved to offer the most up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of the organizational functions of today's complex and ever-changing healthcare delivery system.