Applying Service Concepts in Manufacturing

Much of the writing on Service in the Operations Management literature has focused on the application of manufacturing based concepts in a service environment1.There has been a limited amount of consideration of the service element of manufacturing companies such as field service operations2, but only recently has the reverse begun to take place. A key contribution to this reverse trend is the ‘service factory’ concept developed by Richard Chase (1988). The research in this paper focuses on this concept and its application in a UK environment.