An overview on service operations management

Service sector has known an important growth during the past several decades and represents actually the largest and fastest-growing portion of the developed countries´ economies. In this paper, we focus on the concept of service by defining what services are, emphasizing the characteristics of services and displaying the different classifications proposed in the literature. Based on these classifications, we highlight the main differences at the organizational level between manufacturing structures and service structures on one hand and between different types of service structures on the other hand. We also present the different decisions related to service operations management that we classify according to their time horizon.