Dr. 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 Ph.D. in Operations Management, as well as an MBA and B.S. from UCLA. He has taught at the Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland), and the University of Arizona.

His research examines service process design and service strategy. Two of his Harvard Business Review articles, "Where Does the Customer Fit in a Service Operation?" and "The Service Factory" (with D. Garvin) have been cited as classics. His work has been quoted in Tom Peters' Liberation Management and Davidow and Malone's The Virtual Organization, and most recently in Heskett et al., The Service Profit Chain. He was listed among the top 20 contributors in the history of operations management in a recent International Journal of Operations and Production Management survey of academics in the field, and the Journal of Retailing identified him as one of the leading scholars in services marketing. Some of his recent articles include "Beefing Up Operations in Service Firms" (with R. Hayes), "Make Your Service Failsafe" (with D. Stewart) both in the Sloan Management Review, and "The Mall is My Factory: Reflections of a Service Junkie" in Production and Operations Management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the Decision Sciences Institute. He was also an Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

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.

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 graduate-level courses in Operations Management and Project Management for over 25 years. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and has taught at Northeastern University.

F. Robert Jacobs is 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 Ph.D. in Operations Management. He has published 4 book and over 30 research articles on topics that include inventory control, the design of manufacturing facilities, cellular manufacturing and the scheduling of manufacturing operations. He is President of the Decision Sciences Institute (2000-01).