The eighth edition continues to acknowledge and emphasize the essential uniqueness of service management. The text is organized in four parts: part one: understanding services, which provides a historical context as well as distinguishes the distinctive characteristics of service operations; part two: designing the service enterprise, which covers designing the service enterprise to support the competitive strategy; part three: managing service operations that details topics such as Managing Capacity, Demand and Waiting Lines and Service Supply Relationships and; part four: quantitative models for service management that addresses forecasting and managing service inventory. (McGraw-Hill)