Many of the above approaches of improving manufacturing flexibility are also applicable to service operations, such as product design, process design, systems flexibility and layout flexibility.

A key area of improving flexibility in services, as also to a great extent in manufacturing, is by balancing of objectives. The two basic objectives for an operations manager are customer satisfaction and resource utilization. The key requirements of the customer, once understood, must then be matched with the resources available. If the objectives are driven primarily by the need for efficient use of resources then customer satisfaction will be more difficult to achieve. Given infinite resources any system, no matter how badly managed, might provide adequate service. The truth will be that there will not be infinite resources, and existing resources will often not completely mesh with the achievement of total customer satisfaction. Thus the service will be altered to meet the competencies of the organization, rather than extra resources being added to meet a higher level service. A matrix approach for customer satisfaction and resource utilization can be used, as shown in Table 7.3 for a travel agency service.

In this example of a travel agency it has been established that customers rate advice and accurate ticketing as most important (specification) and that they are prepared to...