Abstract
Given the increasing share of services in emerging markets such as India, China, Brazil, South Africa and others, productivity and quality of service operations have repercussions in sustaining economic growth and global competitiveness. Although the literature on service operations is quite rich, the service contexts in these economies are different and require serious attention from operations management researchers. It was in this context that this special issue was conceptualized and we are pleased to see a very good response to our invitations to researchers for submitting their research works. The number of research articles received highlights the fact that, of late, services research in emerging economies has increased.
Managing service operations in emerging markets are uniquely characteristic and pose challenges that vary from one economy to another. Such challenges originate either from the operational contexts or from the expectations of the customers in these markets. The major operational contexts that differentiate with the service contexts in the developed economies are (a) infrastructural bottlenecks, (b) large-scale operations and (c) cultural diversity of the customers as well as the servers. The main expectation from any service operations in these economies is that the service should be affordable to a larger section of society. The above challenge the service providers to achieve the highest levels of performance on the conflicting dimensions of cost, quality and flexibility.
Infrastructural Bottlenecks
Traditionally, the economic growth rates in the emerging economies had been very slow and they have picked up only recently. As a result, the infrastructure required for sustaining the growth, and for facilitating a higher quality of life, is in short supply. It not only does affect the ease of doing business but also limits the achievement of excellence in service delivery. For example, insufficient road as well as rail and port capacities in India are not only increasing the logistics cost but also affecting other performances such as transport delay, slow evacuation of cargo and lower port turnaround (J. Dash, 2018). A recent study estimated the cost of road congestion in Indian cities at ₹1.5 lakh crore annually. Gupta et al. (2017) show how the insufficient capacity of government procurement centres lead to farmers selling their harvest at prices below the minimum support prices. Thus, while addressing problems of service operations, operations management researchers must consider such infrastructural constraints in their problem formulations.
Large-scale Operations
Close to 40 per cent of the world population live in the emerging economies, which cover only 15 per cent of the geographic area. Thus, one of the characteristics of these economies is that they have a very high density of population. This causes service facilities to be overcrowded, which in turn affects the quality of the service delivered. Overcrowding gets aggravated when there are also infrastructural constraints, resulting in a failure to deliver basic public services—longer queues in hospitals (Basu, 2017), higher costs of providing services and logistics (D. K. Dash, 2018), etc. In a survey, Irving et al. (2017) found that in emerging economies a doctor consults their patient for less time—doctors in India and China on average consult for about 2 minutes—than the doctors in developed economies do, about 20 minutes on average. This leads to poor medical services and higher mortality rates in the developing countries.
If service systems are imagined as a queue, to deliver a similar level of service as their counterparts in the developed world, service organizations in emerging economies, including public systems, face a far greater levels of arrival rate. This means that either the capacity of the facilities and other associated infrastructure need to be expanded significantly or the efficiency of the service delivery system needs to be increased to levels that set newer benchmarks. This puts a challenge before the operations management researchers to address more complex and large-scale problems.
Cultural Diversity
Unlike a manufacturing environment, services include a greater degree of human interaction, especially between the frontline employees and the customers. Thus, the behaviour displayed by both the employees and the customers affects service outcome and quality. Numerous studies show that culture influences and shapes human behaviour and have advocated consideration of culture in management research (Hofstede, 2001). Therefore, researchers in the field of service operations take into account the cultural influences on the service delivery process (Prasad & Babbar, 2000; Roth & Menor, 2003). The fact has motivated operations management researchers to consider culture as an antecedent in explaining services outcome. For example, Yayla-Kullu, Tansitpong, Gnanlet, McDermott, and Durgee (2015) studied how major cultural characteristics affect physical surroundings and products, employee behaviour and service supply chain operations.
It is interesting to note that emerging economies are mostly located in Asia, Africa and South America, and that they possess cultural identities distinct from their developed counterparts in Europe and North America. Therefore, it is natural to expect that service operations in these countries have a different operating environment in terms of employee and customer behaviour. Further, a few of these economies is characterized by significant diversities in the cultural behaviour within their national boundaries (Banerjee, 2008), which means delivery of services (including public services) across national boundaries will face multiple challenges and diversity in outcomes.
Affordable Service
Recently, Reliance Jio in India offered the cheapest data rates in the world with free voice calls (Ganjoo, 2018). The result has been that now India has one of the largest user bases of smartphones and has helped many, including students, farmers and small businesspersons. This is a classic example of affordable services in countries where per capita income, due to a large population, is very low. Per capita income in emerging economies is lower and, hence, their ability to pay for services is also lower. Hence, it is important for service providers to focus more on making their services affordable so as to reach out to a greater market.
We have seen above that the challenge before the operations management researchers and practitioners is to achieve superior levels of performance in terms of cost and quality of service while facing challenges like infrastructural constraints, large-scale operations and diverse groups of employees and customers. This can be achieved by focusing on innovating scheduling, achieving superior levels of productivity, leveraging volume and by extensive use of technology.
About This Special Issue
This special issue received 27 research articles covering different aspects of services operations in emerging economies. The articles covered industries such as health care, banking, port operations, railways, government services and customer care operations. After a rigorous review process, we could accept only seven articles for inclusion in the special issue. Out of seven, three articles relate to health care operations and highlight the growth happening and operational challenges that health care services face in emerging economies. The articles on health care address issues related to identifying dimensions of patient attributes, patient loyalty and coordination among government departments which control different health care resources.
The article ‘Patient’s Utility for Various Attributes of Diabetes Care Services’ assesses the relative importance of various health care service attributes in diabetes care. The authors find that in addition to the quality of treatment, spend per visit and waiting time are the most important criteria that determine a patient’s choice for a care provider. The findings indicate that the quality of the care provided, its efficiency and the affordability are important issues to be addressed in emerging economies. Another paper on health care explores structural collaboration between distinct organizational participants that use separate resources. They observe that effective coordination is important in care delivery and such coordination can be achieved when processes are specifically designed to respond to the needs of patients. Hence, there is a need for having performance measures that cover treatment procedures, clinical treatment protocols, critical pathways and statements of expected health care outcomes. Another article tries to build a conceptual model that explores the relationship of the antecedents of patients’ loyalty and satisfaction. This paper does a comprehensive review of the literature that includes factors affecting the quality of services. Prominent among these factors are speed, reliability, passenger comfort, convenience, system safety, special services, innovations, efficiency and itinerary accuracy.
The special issue also includes three articles addressing issues from infrastructure development. The issues that are addressed relate to multimodal transportation, port and railways. One article focuses on the fact that increasingly shippers are seeking door-to-door transport services from the transport operators. To provide such services, transport operators require to use multiple modes of transportation. This article identifies the factors that affect the quality of multimodal transport services. Another article reviews the dynamics and inefficiencies that exist in port operations in India. It mainly focuses on the interplay between port pricing, productivity and efficiency and uses system modelling and causal diagramming to explain the dynamics arising out of the interactions. Railways being one of the major transport service providers in the emerging economies, the third article on locomotive assignment problems becomes very appropriate to this special issue. This article does a comprehensive review of the literature that includes factors affecting the quality of services. They also include speed, reliability, passenger comfort, convenience, system safety, special services, innovations, efficiency, itinerary accuracy, etc. The article also reviews issues and problems that are very specific in the Indian context and identifies the problems to be taken up by researchers for further studies.
The special issue also includes an article titled ‘Assessing the Value of a Government Call Centre in India: A Case Study’ that captures the behavioural diversities of a public service delivery system. The article sees socio-technical factors as an important determinant for delivering citizen services. It focuses on the design of an information system for a government call centre and addresses issues on behavioural diversity while making such a system more effective.
The Extension
The problems and issues facing services operations in emerging economies can definitely not be covered in one special issue. This special issue can be viewed as an effort that merely represents the research on services operation in both developed and emerging economies. It also tries to integrate individual research that has appeared in the past. A key takeaway from the issue is that it characterizes the service operations problem in the emerging economies in terms of large-scale operations, infrastructural bottlenecks, cultural diversity and the need for affordability. It is actually a challenge to achieve higher levels of performance on dimensions that are contradictory in nature. Future research must focus on identifying the different aspects of such characteristics and studying them. There is also a need for an analysis of constrained large-scale optimization problems and innovating models that deliver performance far superior to current benchmarks.
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their services and contributions in making this issue possible.