Gliatis, V., Minis, I., Lavasa, K., M.

Proceedings from the 16th Annual International Conference for the European Operations Management Association, Sweden, June 14-17, no. 196, 2009.

Service failures represent an important source of variability in service operations and a major hallenge for service managers. Yet the effective management of failures is a prerequisite to achieve lean services. In this paper we attempt to quantify the impact of failures that lead to rework on various performance measures of service production systems. We use district event simulation for predicting the behavior of a typical twostage service system (front-office, back-office), and design of experiments to define the impact of failure parameters to key system performance attributes.