A Study Of Postponement Model Of Service Production

With the development of country's economic, the service industry as a share of the tertiary industry becomes more and more important in the national economy, service enterprises are facing increasing competition and threat. To enhance their competitiveness in the market, it is necessary to improve its operation and management methods, to solve the contradiction between low cost and high-quality services, in meeting the needs of individual customers while achieving high service delivery efficiency, so as to achieve the goal of the so-called mass customization.Postponement manufacturing as an advanced mode of production technology in the 21st century is expected to reduce the risk of product diversification. We not only make use of this technology to control costs, but also realize the diversification of products and personalized requirements; it is one important means to achieve mass customization. Postponement technology becomes one of the hot management theory and research at home and abroad in recent years. In the United States, Japan and other developed countries, there are more and more in-depth study on the application of the range and it has made tremendous benefits. However, the use of Postponement technology in our country is still in the initial stage, and basically based on a manufacturing background, little involved in the service industry. In this sense, this study will apply the Postponement technology to the service system designing, using qualitative and quantitative Methods to analysis the characteristics of service products and services to build the model of Customer Order Decoupling Point, then verify the applicability of the model.This paper reviewed and summarized the research literature at home and abroad of ideas and methodology on the theory of Postponement Production. It discusses the problem of service process optimization and study the improvement of the service efficiency and customer responsiveness in the decision-making. The paper first introduces the basic theory of Postponement in production, and then discusses the factors that affect the Customer Order Decoupling Point. On this basis, we make Modular decomposition of the service product, and then establish service products module tree in order to determine Customer Order Decoupling Point,and establish the postponement of decision-making model.This study made empirical analysis from the view of case study. By making comparative analysis of decision-making model between the original service supply chain processes and the existing supply chain processes at the point of qualitative and quantitative views, it demonstrated the applicability of postponement theory. It shows that there are several factors that affect the decision-making of Customer Order Decoupling Point, such as service forecasting,Service reservation, the level of product modularity and customer contact that is decisive. The Selection of Customer Order Decoupling Point and is different from the manufacturing sector because of the customer contact. The final decision of postponement production is to decide the least number of customized modules, the less customized service modules, the higher and the efficiency.The main contribution of this paper is:from a theoretical sense, this study applied the postponement technology to the service system optimization to study the problem of service system postponement by the combination of services and service processes, looking at site selection of the entire service, which updated the service management research perspective, expanding and enriching postponement technology in production research. From a practical sense, the introduction of postponement in production makes the service industry to achieve more effective service system-design, improving service efficiency and customer satisfaction. Service enterprises could provide more meaningful guiding principles to resolve the conflict between Customization and Efficiency, achieving quick responding to customer demands and reducing service delivery time and costs. At the same time, this article validates the correctness and applicability of postponement model in the hotel catering service system, which provides timely theoretical guidance to improve the operational efficiency of its service system and also helps to hotels use more practical guiding principles to resolve the conflict between Customization and Efficiency which the hotel catering services always facing.