Richard B Chase is Justin B Dart Professor of Operations Management and Director of the Center for Service Excellence at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He received his PhD in Operations Management, as well as an MBA and BS from UCLA. He has taught at the Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland), and the University of Arizona. Dr. Chase has lectured/ consulted recently on service and excellence to such organizations as General Electric, the Southern California Gas Company, the Cato Institute, the Conference Board, Aloha Airlines, The Davies Group, and the American Marketing Association. He has developed executive programs for Honeywell, IBM, and DEC. His money back service guarantee for his MBA course on Service Management has received international attention in the business press. He has recently completed “Service in the U.S.,” with Aleda Roth and Chris Voss, a major services benchmarking project examining financial services as well as others sponsored by Severn Trent and the British Ministry of Trade. Dr Chase was listed among the top 20 contributors in the history of operations management in the IJPOM survey, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the Decision Sciences Institute.

F Robert Jacobs is E-II Faculty Fellow and Professor of Operations Management at the Kelley school of Business, Indiana University. He has degrees in Industrial Engineering, Computer and Information Science, an MBA, and a PhD in Operations Management. His PhD is from The Ohio State University, and he is a past president and a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute, which also awarded him with the Distinguished Service Award in fall, 2004. He has authored 5 books and over 30 research articles on topics that include inventory control, the design of manufacturing facilities, cellular manufacturing and the scheduling of manufacturing operations.

Nicholas J Aquilano, now in well-deserved retirement, was Professor of Management at the university of Arizona in Tucson where he has been writing books and teaching undergraduate and graduatelevel courses in Operations Management and Project Management for over 25 years. He received his PhD from UCLA and has taught at Northeastern University. He has worked for General Electric, and he has also taught at Northeastern University and The Executive Institute of Yogoslavia.

Nitin K Agarwal is an Associate Professor in the area of Operations Management and Quantitative Techniques at Indian Institute of Management, Indore. He received his PhD in Operations Research from North Carolina State University, USA, an MS from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Integrated M Tech from IIT, Mumbai. He has co-authored several papers, which have appeared in Journals like International Journal of Project Management and IEEE sponsored international conferences. His research and consulting interests are in Operations Management, Supply Chain Management, Project Management and Mathematical Programming. At IIM Indore, Prof. Agarwal teaches flagship Postgraduate program participants, executive program participants as well as trains practitioners from Industry via Institute’s Management Development Programs as well as specialized in-company programs designed specifically for the particular needs of an organization.