Erosion of service quality
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By Rogelio Oliva Associate Professor of Information and Operations Management |
My research explores how policies that are rational, yet limited by cognitive constraints, interact with characteristics of operational processes to determine long-term productivity, quality and profitability.
My core premise is that to understand operations we require an integrated understanding of the social systems that produce and consume products and services, as well as the technological characteristics of the systems that deliver them. My research is phenomenon-driven, thus I spend a great deal of time working with managers, doing fieldwork and collecting data. I use simulation models to formalize the representation of the behavioral and technological complexity of the situations I study.
My dissertation work formalized the behavioral and technical interactions in the context of service operations — where the social dimension of the production process is more striking than in manufacturing. It also articulated an endogenous theory of erosion of service quality. I am still working to expand this research stream by formalizing some of the empirical findings into a decision support model and identifying other settings to calibrate the model.
I am also exploring the strategic implications of my findings in service operations. Specifically, I am looking at firms with aggressive growth rates and the transition that some manufacturers are making to bundle services with their products. My theory predicts faster erosion of service quality in both settings.
In 2003 I initiated a research project to identify and explore the effects of individuals' bounded rationality (rational choice limited by knowledge and cognitive capacity) and biases in their replenishment decisions and the role of these decisions in the creation of phantom orders in supply chains. I am currently working on testing some hypothesis with experimental data, and observing processes (from forecasting through supply management) and collecting data from a couple industry partners.
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