In Defense of the Production-Line Approach to Service

摘要

The desirability of transferring manufacturing logic and practices to service operations, strongly advocated by Levitt (1972; 1976) two decades ago, is now commonly challenged by both service researchers and practitioners. We defend a "production-line approach to service' by arguing that services can "reindustrialize" by applying revised, progressive manufacturing technologies. We describe how a "lean" production-line approach to service has been adotped by services businesses such as Taco Bell and Southwest Airlines. Overall, services tend to be innovation laggards, compared to manufacturing. Even employee empowerment, considered a critical success factor in services is more widely practiced in manufacturing. Looking ahead, mass customization can be viewed as the convergence of service and manufacturing logic.