Industry / Company Profile: This involves creating a report that describes the key operational and strategic challenges in a selected service industry, and how various firms are managing these challenges. Alternatively the report could focus on a single firm, describing its service design, competitive position, underlying service process, the main characteristics of its operations, key operational choices it has made, operational policies, key metrics, etc. This could be a company you work for/with, or one that you can have access to and observe. If it is a company that you are a customer of (e.g. chipotle) then you should plan to visit multiple times, at different times, and truly endeavor to understand the business. You should also visit “competitors” to make note of similarities and differences and ultimately the choices the companies are making and the tradeoffs that go along with those choices. 2. Service Improvement (i.e., a mini-consulting project): This involves use of the concepts and methodologies introduced in class to analyze a real-life service operations system, diagnose its problems, identify opportunities for improvement and quantify potential costs, benefits, risks and service impacts. This type of project requires observing the process, collecting data, and possibly interviewing company staff. This type of report is different from a Company Profile in that it is more prescriptive or problem/solution focused rather than descriptive of the whole company.3. Service Innovation Analysis: This type of project takes an in-depth look at a recent innovation in service. For example, the new “Order online, pickup in store” option at Starbucks, or the “Self-order kiosks” at Panera. This project should describe the innovation, what it is intended to accomplish, how it fits in with the company strategic priorities, and how the service process has been modified to incorporate the innovation. The innovation under study must be sufficiently important and noteworthy so as to warrant study.Must include in the paper: A thorough presentation of all facets of the Service Design Framework. (This does not mean all facets need equal attention, just that they need to be addressed.)Reverse-engineering of what the company is doing – what choices have they made and why have they made the choices that they have made from the perspective of class concepts (for example – if they require reservations this is a choice – why does that make sense/or not make sense?)How do the choices they have made support the service they are trying to provide (the we will statement)?Correct application of concepts and frameworks from the course (connection to cases, articles, book concepts, class lectures, etc.) – the more relevant connections you can make the better (but they must be relevant connections)Careful and thoughtful analysis identifying strengths and weaknesses of the company/service/innovation.Quality of any numeric analysis and/or proposed solutions (if applicable)tradeoffs and queuing are the class concept, please mention them in the assignment. For example, if the restaurant is too popular, how does this restaurant to using what ways or functions to solve customer waiting so long?
