A working playbook synthesized from Vanderbilt Owen MGT 6479 (Management of Service Operations, Fall 2025, Professor Antoine Feylessoufi) and the canonical literature of services management: Frances Frei's The Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right (HBR), Heskett's Lessons in the Service Sector and Service Profit Chain, Heskett & Schlesinger's Breaking the Trade-Off Between Efficiency and Service, the Metters et al. textbook Successful Service Operations Management, and a curated case library: Benihana of Tokyo, La Quinta Hotels, MotherLand Air, Oberoi Hotels, Zipcar, Dutch Bros Coffee, and Shouldice Hospital.

Plus the team's own integrative deliverables: the Hattie B's Hot Chicken Four Things analysis (applying Frei's framework to Nashville's hot chicken phenomenon) and the La Quinta multi-attribute regression report (predicting hotel operating margin from site characteristics with R² = 0.976 on the OP_M_83 model). Plus the Benihana simulation analysis, the MotherLand Air yield-management game, and 2 practice problem sets that anchor the quantitative work.

Why this masterclass exists

In most developed economies, the service sector is now the dominant economic engine — 80% of US GDP, 80% of US employment. Yet productivity growth in services has consistently lagged manufacturing for decades. The opportunity is structural: most operations-management tools were designed for factories (where the customer is absent, the product is tangible, and inventory smooths supply-demand mismatches). Services break each of those assumptions.

• The customer is often present — and frequently participates in producing the service. A bank teller's productivity depends on whether the customer brought their ID; a doctor's diagnosis depends on whether the patient describes their symptoms accurately.
• The delivery of a service is part of the product. When you have a great meal at Benihana, the chef's theatrical performance is the meal; the food alone wouldn't justify the price.
• Services are perishable and intangible. An empty hotel room on Tuesday night is gone forever; a half-empty plane cannot be "saved" until next week.
• You cannot put customers in inventory. A surge of demand in a restaurant cannot be deferred; either you serve them now or you lose them.

MGT 6479 (Vanderbilt Owen, Professor Antoine Feylessoufi) treats service operations as a distinct discipline with its own frameworks, its own quantitative tools, and its own integration challenges. The course is built on three thematic blocks — (1) understanding services, (2) designing services (process design + site selection), (3) managing services under uncertainty (queueing + revenue management), and (4) improving services (quality + customer behavior + growth). The integrative method is the case method, anchored by Frei's Four Things framework as the spine and reinforced through the team's own application projects on Hattie B's Hot Chicken and Panda Express.

This masterclass synthesizes the course's frameworks with the canonical literature — Frei, Heskett, Schlesinger, Metters — and the team's hands-on artifacts. The result is approximately 30,000 words organized into 10 modules plus a Master Playbook.

By the end, you should be able to:

• Diagnose the four characteristics that make services structurally different from manufacturing operations
• Apply Frei's Four Things framework (offering / funding / employee management / customer management) to any service business
• Construct a Strategic Service Vision and assess the integration across its four elements (Heskett)
• Run process analysis for services and identify bottleneck operations (Benihana worked end-to-end)
• Build multi-attribute regression models for site selection (La Quinta worked end-to-end with R² = 0.976)
• Apply queueing analysis to services with emphasis on customer waiting psychology
• Run yield / revenue management with the newsvendor logic adapted for service capacity
• Evaluate service quality frameworks and the Gaps Model (SERVQUAL)