The service industry has been rapidly expanded. However, service companies have been confronted with severe competition in market. While most of the companies have tried to focus and improve service encounter so as to get competitive advantage, the results were not satisfied.
In this study, we suggest that managers of the service industry should apply strategic operations management ideas from manufacturing to their line of businesses in order to acquire competitive advantage. This is because the characteristics of service are not totally different from those of manufacturing anymore. And it is necessary for integrative approaches to deal with manufacturing and service at the same thesis. The strategic operations management of manufacturing can be one of them.
The major contributions of this study are as follows. First, the strategic operations management can be the source of competitive advantage for manufacturing and service. Second, the competitive advantage is reenforced by executing the strategic operations management continuously.
The case study shows that two service companies, which apply two different strategic operations management approaches to their businesses, acquire competitive advantage. This complies with the one of the most important insights from the manufacturing area: there are more than one ways to build operations capability that can be used as a competitive weapon.
