Operation Management Bachelor - Case Study Example

The role of the total quality management should be emphasised as an important strategy for the London Zoo to increase the number of visitors. Another unique and contributing factor for the Zoo can be the improvement in the service management in order to meet the specific needs of the customers. While keeping in view the case of London Zoo the organization is advised to use innovation as an approach to compete. Since the last few decades the concept of tourists' destination has been transformed from merely entertaining sites to highly automate and managed business organizations competing in the tourism industry.

There are many pros and cons of the trend. There are many factors that create a global environment for the sector, such as efficient and low cost of services, efficient logistics from production to the counter, new and changing visitors' patterns etc. All these developments are supported by the penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) across the entire business chain from plan to services, logistics, sales, branding, and market research. (Emcc, 2005) Service Operation Management is related to service quality.

Delivering the expected quality by meeting the customers' expected value is the essence of service operation management. . The characteristics are that, they are intangible, they are variable, they are perishable, and they are simultaneously produced and consumed (Shiffman and Kanuk, 1997). The evaluation of service qualities highly depends on the visitors' experience of service qualities in the service. This evaluation is difficult after a visit (Ostrom and Lacobucci, 1995). Dale, (1989), "consumer views and normally results from consumer's expectations of service, with their ideas of how services should be delivered".

Daryl Wyckoff has defined service quality as, "Quality is the degree of excellence intended, and the control of variability in achieving that excellence, in meeting customers' requirements." (Wyckoff, 1984, p 81) This theorem of quality is however not accurate as experts says 'Quality is whatever the customer says it is and the quality of a particular product or service is whatever the customer perceives it to be' (Powers,1997, p 179). So the main emphasis is on the customer and perceived quality.

When the delivered service does not meet the perceived quality then there is gap which can be best described by the below mentioned gap model by Parasuraman, 1988.THE SERVICE QUALITY GAP MODELDespite the useful underlying concepts of this model, in practice measuring customer satisfaction can be very subjective in nature. SERVQUAL is a survey technique that attempts to quantify the service gaps; however in practice its application is limited (Parasuraman, 1988). A manager may be able to apply the underlying concepts in practice, but any quantitative application requires lots of time and resources which small enterprise lack.

Quality is made up of two components viz. technical and interpersonal. The service marketers like small