Service-profit chain

Heskett, J. L., Jones, T. O., Loveman, G. W., Sasser, W. Earl, Jr., Schlesinger, L. A. 1994. Putting the service profit-chain to work. Harvard Business Review, 72(2) 164-174. 

The service profit chain rings true at SYSCO. The companies with highly satisfied associates deliver better results. 

Virtually all published chain-link or cascading models linking vendor resource inputs with customer-level profits share roots in Heskett, et al. s (1994) Service-Profit Chain (SPC). Examples include its derivatives (e.g. Kamakura, Mittal, de Rose, Mazzon, 2002 Love-man, 1998 Soteriou Zenios, 1999), the return-on-quality (ROQ) framework (Rust, Zahorik, Keiningham, 1995), and the general satisfaction-profit chain (Anderson Mittal, 2000). Further, with one exception (Bowman Narayandas, 2004), all are developed in a consumer setting. 

Figure 11.1. The service-profit chain for business markets.

Loveman, G. W. 1998. Employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, and financial performance an empirical examination of the service profit chain in retail banking. Journal of Service Research, 2(2) 138-144. 

Heskett, J.L., W. E. Sasser Jr. and L. A. Schlesinger. The Service Profit Chain. The Free Press, New York, New York, 1997. 

Kamakura, W. Mttal, V. de Rosa, F. Afonso, J. (2002) Assessing the service-profit chain. In Marketing Science, 21(3), 294-317. 

Anderson, E. W. c Mittal, V. 2000. Strengthening the satisfaction profit chain. Journal of Service Research, 3(2) 107-120. 

Although polymers in-service are required to be resistant toward hydrolysis and solar degradation, for polymer deformulation purposes hydrolysis is an asset. Highly crystalline materials such as compounded polyamides are difficult to extract. For such materials hydrolysis or other forms of chemolysis render additives accessible for analysis. Polymers, which may profitably be depolymerised into their monomers by hydrolysis include PET, PBT, PC, PU, PES, POM, PA and others. Hydrolysis occurs when moisture causes chain scissions to occur within the molecule. In polyesters, chain scissions take place at the ester linkages (R-CO-O-R ), which causes a reduction in molecular weight as well as in mechanical properties. Polyesters show their susceptibility to hydrolysis with dramatic shifts in molecular weight distribution. Apart from access to the additives fraction, hydrolysis also facilitates molecular characterisation of the polymer. In this context, it is noticed that condensation polymers (polyesters, -amides, -ethers, -carbonates, -urethanes) have also been studied much... 

It is crucial to know the requirements and service breakpoints of each customer segment (Fig. 22.3) and the related economic opportunities. Most successful players go as far as designing and tailoring differentiated supply chains and service level offers (Fig. 22.4), and tracking service levels and profitability to address service issues and extra costs. 

It is important to recognize that mission statements and strategic plans vary among types of organizations, especially within health care. The mission statement and strategic plan of a not-for-profit children s research hospital likely will be different from that of a for-profit pharmacy chain (Table 24-1). The aspects of a professional service that will need to be emphasized in a business plan will vary as well. The not-for-profit children s research hospital may want to see how a new professional service will result in enhanced clinical outcomes or benefit the greatest number of children at the lowest possible cost. On the other... 

The overall purpose of an operational planning model is to maximize the net profit of the system in the face of imcertainty in fruit production, third party fruit availability and costs and potential chain disruption events such as unexpected out-of-service of processing plants and storage chambers, reduction in transportation capacity, etc. The total profit is defined as the total income per product sales minus the sum of fruit... 

Supply chain networks Simultaneous maximization of (1) participants expected profits, (2) average safe inventory level (for plants, distribution centers and retailers), (3) average customer service levels (for retailers), (4) robustness of selected objectives to demand uncertainties and fair profit distribution. A two-phase fuzzy decisionmaking method Chen and Lee (2004) extended the smdy of Chen et al. (2003) by including uncertainty in product demands and prices. Cheu et al. (2003b) Cheu and Lee (2004)... 

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