Service Management, Student Workbook: An Integrated Approach to Supply Chain Management and Operations

11. Managing Demand and Supply in Services

11.5. Summary of the Chapter

The development of a service system proceeds from the design of the service, to aggregate planning of resources, to building of the system. The basic objective of aggregate planning is to plan a firm’s resources so that the firm’s capacity and demand for outputs are matched. Thus aggregate planning may alternatively emphasize adjusting the demand side or the supply side to achieve a desired balance. In this chapter, strategies and tools that operations managers can use in accomplishing the challenging task of balancing demand and supply in services are discussed.

The major reasons that make this a particularly difficult task in services are first reviewed. For effective ...