Focusing on customer time in field service: A normative approach

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Apte, Aruna; Apte, Uday M.; Venugopal, Nandagopal
• 署名单位: United States Department of Defense; United States Navy; Naval Postgraduate School; United States Department of Defense; United States Navy; Naval Postgraduate School; Verizon Communications
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 189-202
• 关键词: field service; customer service; service quality; service operations

摘要

Although customer convenience should be rightfully considered a central element in field services, the customer experience suggests that service enterprises rarely take the customer's preferred time into account in making operational and scheduling decisions. In this paper we present the results of our exploratory research into two interrelated topics: the explicit inclusion of customer time in nonemergency field service delivery decisions and the analysis of trade-off between the customer's convenience and field service provider's cost. Based on prior research in service quality we identify and illustrate two time-based performance metrics that are particularly appropriate for assessing service quality in nonemergency field services: performance and conformance quality. To determine vehicle routes, we develop a hybrid heuristic derived from the existing and proven heuristic methods. A numerical example closely patterned after real-life data is generated and used within a computational experiment to investigate alternate policies for promise time windows. Our experiment shows that over a reasonable range of customer cost parameters the policy of shorter promise time windows reduces the combined total cost incurred by the provider and the customers and should be considered