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JMTM
21,4

Service postponement
Translating manufacturing postponement
to service operations

470

Biao Yang
The York Management School, University of York, York, UK

Received January 2009

Revised September 2009
Accepted December 2009

Ying Yang
School of Management and Business, Aberystwyth University,
Aberystwyth, UK, and

Sharon Williams
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Abstract
Purpose The paper aims to explore the application of manufacturing postponement in a service
setting.
Design/methodology/approach In elaborating on the many key differences between goods and
services highlighted in the literature, it has been argued that postponement strategies developed in
manufacturing have a potential for improving service performance. The authors then examine the
implications of postponement for the service push-pull boundary and the line of visibility.
Findings A focus on postponement at the service push-pull boundary enables more activities to be
performed in advance. Its benefits include reducing costs and shortening service delivery time.
Postponement can also assist service providers in re-locating the line of visibility to develop a more
effective service operation.
Originality/value While the significant economic benefits of postponement have been documented
in manufacturing companies, the literature has also mentioned the potential role of postponement in
service. However, very little has been written with respect to the exploitation of the transferability and
applicability of postponement to a service setting. In this paper, the authors have explored what value
postponement might have to offer for service operations. The application of postponement has a
potential for service performance akin to what is expected of a manufacturing organisation.
Keywords Service delivery systems, Lead times
Paper type Conceptual paper

Journal of Manufacturing Technology

Management
Vol. 21 No. 4, 2010
pp. 470-483
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1741-038X
DOI 10.1108/17410381011046580

Introduction
While success is possible through excelling at either product leadership or operational
excellence, nowadays, it is difficult to imagine that any manufacturer can compete solely
on providing superior products without offering some services (Baines et al., 2009).
This is reflected in the literate by the recent interest in servitisation of business
(Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988), service dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004),
product-service systems (Mont, 2002) and services science (Chesbrough and Spohrer,
2006). In fact, many traditionally manufacturing-based companies have long viewed
the integration of services into physical product offerings as a strategy to generate
more revenue (Chase and Garvin, 1989; Wise and Baumgartner, 1999). General
Electric and International Business Machines have captured the revenue potential of

commercialising services around a physical product, and received the majority of their
revenues from the sale of services (Chesbrough and Spohrer, 2006). By offering extra
services to the existing products, companies also can gain a deep understanding of their
customers needs (Cohen et al., 2006). The growing importance of supply chain thinking
further facilitates service solutions designed to increase the value added for
manufacturing companies (Hill et al., 2002). For example, vendor managed inventory
is often a service offered by a manufacturer that provides inventory management for its
customer. From a historical view, Schmenner (2009) argues that the bundling of
manufactured goods to downstream services, along with the integration backward
along the supply chain, has long been an integral part of manufacturing companies
strategy to control their supply chains. This has aimed to assure reliable deliveries of
raw materials and distribution to customers.
While service activities are being incorporated more and more into manufacturing
companies, the dominance of the services sector is also receiving wide recognition in the
economy particularly in terms of production and employment. However, services exhibit
higher quality variations and are generally less productive and profitable (Chase and
Apte, 2007). Chesbrough and Spohrer (2006) further note that, despite the increasing
servitisation of economies, the productivity growth in services has lagged behind in
agriculture and manufacturing. In an attempt to cope with this challenge, there is a long
history in literature transferring industrial management philosophies and techniques to a
service context in order to bring advances in service productivity and quality. This paper
contributes to this stream of research by attempting to provide initial thoughts on how to
extend and adapt postponement, a traditional manufacturing and increasingly supply
chain oriented concept, to service operations. Postponement is about delaying the creation
of time, place and/or form of product design, production and distribution so as to better
conform to the customers ultimate requirements. While the significant economic benefits
of postponement have been documented in manufacturing companies, the literature has
also mentioned the potential role of postponement in service sectors (van Hoek, 2001;
Boone et al., 2007; Yang et al., 2007). However, very little has been written with respect to
the exploitation of the transferability and applicability of postponement to a service
setting. Therefore, we wonder what value the postponement concept might have to offer
for the study of service operations. The rest of this paper is developed as follows: the next
section provides a review of the relevant literature. Then, we examine the role of
postponement in positioning the service push-pull boundary. This is followed by an
exploitation of the implications of postponement for the line of visibility. We conclude the
paper with a discussion of the potential research opportunities that derive from this
research.
Literature review
Postponement was first developed in the marketing literature (Alderson, 1950) but only
recently with the emphasis upon supply chain and the development of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) has it become a much researched manufacturing
approach and an increasingly supply chain oriented strategy. It particularly appears to be
an enabler of mass customised and agile manufacturing. Over time, postponement has
matured into a way of global thinking in product design, production, logistics
and marketing. A key facilitating mechanism in the evolution of postponement is the
emerging realisation of the importance of a more customer-oriented view of operations.

Service
postponement

471

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472

More recently, the postponement literature has suggested the application of postponement
into services as an important research area in exploring new postponement opportunities
(Boone et al., 2007; Yang et al., 2007). In an effort towards this direction, this paper is
focused on the transferability and applicability of postponement to a service setting.
Before further preceding our discussion, this section provides a review of the service
operations literature with regard to transferring good practices traditionally developed in
manufacturing to the service sectors.
Industrialisation of services
The industrialisation of services can be traced back to Levitt (1972, 1976), who focuses
on replicating mass-product logic such as providing limited standard product offerings
and adopting narrow task definitions to achieve consistency in output. Subsequently,
the application of manufacturing-based concepts (such as just-in-time, lean and mass
customisation) in a service environment has been widely studied (Duclos et al., 1995;
Bowen and Youngdahl, 1998; Corbett, 2007). It is not surprising to see them bring
advances in productivity and quality to services, when considering the fact that the
manufacturing industry shares many similar business processes with the service sector.
Many manufacturing strategies may be utilised in service environments to address
issues like workforce scheduling, supplier and distributor management, inventory
control, facilities layout, bottlenecks, queues and routings, which differ little from the
same types of issues in manufacturing environments. Within a supply chain context,
Ellram et al. (2004) and Sengupta et al. (2006) investigate the applicability of industrial
management models in a service environment. Thinking of the movement of patients in
healthcare as a material flow, Towill and Christopher (2005) propose the principles of
manufacturing supply chain design to identify areas of waste and inefficiency.
A process centric perspective
This stream of literature is centred around one of the most distinctive characteristics of
services (in comparison to goods), i.e. they are about processes, not things (Lovelock,
1991). The presence of customers in the service production and delivery process also
enables them to see aspects of the service organisation throughout the whole process.
Service companies thus have to rely primarily on process control. There is evidence
that the process centric methods traditionally developed in manufacturing can be quite
effective in service operations (Karmarkar and Apte, 2007). For example, business
process reengineering has popularised the application to internal service management
processes. The process centric perspective is also taken to investigate the service
design process. While, by their nature, services are fuzzy and difficult to define, the
effective development of new services requires formal processes and practices similar to
those typically found in new product development in manufacturing (Meyer and
DeTore, 1999; Froehle et al., 2000). For example, formalised new product processes are
found to influence the service companys ability to develop new services by increasing
the speed of new service development and better allocating resources (Froehle et al.,
2000). Menor et al. (2002) also suggest that those concepts like the architecture and
modularity developed in new product development are applicable to the new service
development process.

Service delivery system design

The service delivery and design also has broad analogies to manufacturing supply chain
design, e.g. focusing on the decoupling of processes, the degree of customisation, the
level of labour intensity and the nature of demand and supply (Sasser et al., 1978;
Lovelock, 1983; Schmenner, 1986; Tinnila and Vepsalainen, 1995). In designing a service
delivery system, for example, the level of decoupling the back office activities from the
front office activities can take the form of the degree of interaction and customisation. By
varying the level of decoupling, Metters and Vargas (2000) identify a four-category
classification of front office and back office processes in retail banks, where the focus
of the decoupling can be on improving quality and speed, decreasing costs or matching
workers personality types with task requirements. Silvestro et al. (1992) classify services
into three categories, namely, professional service, service shop and mass services, mainly
on the basis of the level of customisation and customer contact. The service volume
measure behind this classification also has clear cost implications. The logic discussed
here can also be found in manufacturing product, process and supply chain design.
For example, to implement a manufacturing postponement strategy, companies may need
to decide which components will be modular, standard and customisable, which parties
are best suited to each task, and what activities are based on forecast (or order) (Yang and
Burns, 2003).
IHIP
A key area addressed in the service operations literature is to identify the unique nature
or characteristics that distinguish services from manufacturing goods. The most notable
characteristics are intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability (or simultaneity) of
production and consumption, and perishability (IHIP) (Sasser et al., 1978), often
referred to as the IHIP characteristics. For example, it appears that all the service
delivery normally starts with the arrival of customers. Quality of services can seldom be
checked and corrected before they are delivered. The perishability of most service
operations (and thus the inability to store services) also implies that the lower levels of
capacity utilisation are acceptable. Thus, a key focus of service operations is on capacity
management. A wide range of strategies have been developed to address the challenge
in reconciling demand and supply in service operations, such as a chase or level
strategy (Sasser, 1976; Crandall and Markland, 1996), delegation of activities to the
customer (Maister, 1982), segmentation of markets (Davidow and Uttal, 1989), yield
management (Kimes, 1989), and switch from a professional service to a job shop, or a mass
service (Bateson, 1990). However, the recent literature has started to question whether the
proposition of IHIP characteristics remains useful (Lovelock and Gummesson, 2004;
Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Correa et al., 2007), as it is increasingly recognised that
the traditional boundary between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred.
Postponement and service: some observations on literature
It is evident from our proceeding literature review that manufacturing and supply chain
management concepts are widely adopted in services. Industralisation of services has
leveraged lean, just in time and mass customisation principles, all of which
postponement is often implemented in connection with (van Hoek, 2001; Feitzinger
and Lee, 1997). Modularity and decoupling, main elements in manufacturing
postponement as discussed later, are also germane to service design process and

Service
postponement

473

JMTM
21,4

474

service delivery system. In relation to the capacity challenges posed by the IHIP
characteristics of services, a strong customer centricity in postponement also implies a
low level of resource utilisation under conditions of uncertainty, bottleneck and congestion
(Yang et al., 2007). Indeed, the service IHIP characteristics appear to rely on an extremely
narrow definition of inventory as finished product waiting for customers (Chopra and
Lariviere, 2005). For example, the perishability (and thus non-inventorisation) is related
not only to services but also to managerial problems relevant to manufacturing companies
and goods. Relevant to this, postponement is often decreasing the amount of finished
inventory (or work completed) before actual demand is known, thus avoiding costly
mismatches in supply and demand. In fact, obsolescence (or perishability) is an essential
incentive to postponement (Zinn and Bowersox, 1988).
While it has increasingly been recognised that many manufacturing tools and concepts
are equally applicable to service operations, the strategy to operate production and supply
chains is not always as relevant in service organisations as in the manufacturing industry.
The transfer of those tools and concepts to a service setting needs to take into account
the distinguishing characteristics of services, particularly uncertainties introduced
by the involvement of customers in the service production and delivery (Chase, 1981;
Harvey, 1998; Kellogg and Nie, 1995). Bullinger et al. (2003) point out that manufacturing
practices may be generalisable to low customer contact services, where very limited
customer-imposed variances bear numerous resemblances to those of physical goods.
They go on to argue that many tools and methods developed for physical goods do not
work well for human and interactive services, or at least they require significant adaption.
Similarly, Piercy and Rich (2009) call for further research to assess the suitability of lean
production, a widely acknowledged powerful tool for reducing wastes and improving
quality in services, in the pure service context. In addition to the above cautions, this
research will also consider the challenges of implementing postponement when exploring
the applicability of postponement in service operations. For example, the adoption of
postponement requires holding back enough capacity to perform the final customised
activities whenever the customer order comes in.
Push-pull boundary
As discussed earlier, the service operations literature has extensively addressed the
implications of the IHIP characteristics of services particularly for capacity management.
However, it should be noted that service capacity management is also interwined with the
manner in which a service delivery is organised (e.g. how much work is done ahead of
demand, how the tasks are divided up, which functions are automated and which rely on
human actions). In this section, we examine the role of postponement in improving service
operations performance through positioning the service push-pull boundary, which
defines the portion of the work that has been performed and stored before the customer
arrives (Chopra and Lariviere, 2005).
In a manufacturing supply chain, the push-pull boundary separates the part of the
supply chain oriented towards customer orders from the part of supply chain based on
forecasting. To improve supply chain performance, postponement is utilised to move
the push-pull boundary closer to the end-user (Naylor et al., 1999), as shown in Figure 1.
The well-known HP DeskJet printer demonstrates the use of postponement (Lee et al.,
1993). In the past, HP produced different versions of finished printers for the US
markets, European markets and Far East markets in Vancouver, Canada, because of

Generic
product

Customers

Activites are
order driven

Activites are forecast driven

Raw
material

Distribution

Generic
Transformation process

475
Customising
transformation
process

Number of
physically
different
items

Service
postponement

Push-pull boundary

Possible distribution

Postponement

Customer
orders

Finished
product

Source: Adapted from Skipworth and Harrison (2004)

different power supply standards in different countries. The push-pull boundary was
at the point of installing the power supply, which was performed at the Vancouver
factory. Through redesigning the printer, HP first produces the standard common core
printers without power supply and final power supply assembly is then delayed and
finished by the distributors. This has enabled HP to make finished printers only as
needed and avoid holding the finished products in inventory in anticipation of
customer demand. Such a postponement strategy has also helped HP to realise over
$2 million per month in logistics savings (Twede et al., 2000).
As with manufacturing postponement, service postponement is facilitated by the
application of a common or standard process before an order arrives. By concentrating
on what is common across the various service requests, a typical way to improve
service efficiency is to standardise or automate service activities. This allows
predictability, pre-planning and processing consistency, which, in turn, can make it
easier to control the service quality (Bowen and Youngdahl, 1998). Over recent years,
customers have benefited from greater speed and convenience through the use of
standard automated self-service channels such as the airline self check-in kiosks and
online banking services. The emphasis on the standardisation of service activities is
also found in the provision of standard advice on leaflets or frequently asked questions
on a web site. Knowledge-based services such as legal advice, tax assistance and
professional education are now also being standardised and further productised as
packaged software (Karmarkar and Apte, 2007). The delivery of standardised service
elements permits the pre-positioning of more service delivery activities, thus

Figure 1.
Schematic location
of push-pull boundary
and manufacturing
postponement

JMTM
21,4

476

increasing the push portion of the service process and shifting the push-pull boundary
closer to the customer. In addition to processes, customer inputs or interfaces could
also be standardised. Customer inputs can take different forms: customers themselves
such as in transport and medical diagnosis; physical goods such as a machine in need
of a repair; and information such as income data for the preparation of a tax return.
The timing of customer inputs (or arrivals) can be planned through a reservation
system, or differential pricing schemes (Sasser, 1976), so as to increase the amount of
push activities. For example, the necessary resources and capacity can be held in
readiness to service the customer. The standardisation or automation of customer
inputs or interfaces can also shift some activities towards customers. Many companies
find a way to have the customer make her or his initial request using a standard
format, e.g. entering data into a web based order form.
Manufacturing postponement involves designing and developing standard or
generic configurable semi-finished products that can be customised quickly and
inexpensively once actual consumer demand is known. However, it is always a challenge
in determining where, when and who to best hold an appropriate amount of those
semi-finished inventories in the channel (Bucklin, 1965; Yang et al., 2004). Stopping
production at a generic product state and delaying creation of product variety may
further require more resources to provide quick throughput times, since throughput can
only be satisfied by production resources and not inventory of final goods. By contrast,
many service providers can shift the push-pull boundary closer to the customer at very
little cost (Chopra and Lariviere, 2005). There is no setup involved as found in
manufacturing. With the growth in the ICTs capabilities, the costs of accessing,
building, storing and maintaining the information inventory are falling rapidly
(Chesbrough and Spohrer, 2006). As a result, final customisation can be easily
implemented particularly in knowledge-based services. Such customisation is found in
many web offerings where tailored information including order status, user ratings and
forums can be delivered to customers at the point of need. Companies such as web
portals can also build high levels of information inventory to provide a greater breadth
of coverage. Many credit rating agencies offer an example of postponement in shifting
the push-pull boundary closer to customers. In selling consumer data and credit scores to
financial institutions, they have built their entire industry around information-collecting
services (i.e. providing information through commercial databases of consumer credit
scores). Instead of carrying excess resources to respond to demand spikes or imposing
long waiting on customers, credit rating agencies gather and store consumer data and
credit scores in anticipation of demand. They collect information in batches, thus
exploiting economies of scale. As a result of this postponement strategy, credit rating
agencies perform more part of a service before the service request arrives while offering
high quality and customised services at a reasonable price (Chopra and Lariviere, 2005).
In addition, the information does not get depleted in consumption, as opposed to the
consumption of a physical product, but remains available for reuses by others.
The application of postponement becomes obvious in a service setting where
customer demand often pulls production taking place in the presence of the customer.
It can increase the amount of work completed before customers arrive by moving the
push-pull boundary in the direction of end-users. This offers the opportunity to improve
service delivery speed (by reducing the amount of pull activities), and reduce costs
(through standardisation and automation). However, as opposed to manufacturers,

service providers usually shape the service together with customers, who typically
participate in the service production and delivery process. The service operations are
defined by the amount of customer contact involved (Chase, 1978). Customer contact or
participation is distinct from customer involvement in manufacturing which can be
achieved through market research, whereby groups of potential customers provide
opinions about general products destined for future production. While useful in terms of
configuring service operations, the push-pull boundary developed from manufacturing
should further take into account the nature of customer contact. The same holds true for
the outsourcing strategy. The applicability of outsourcing in service organisations
appears to have been validated by the recent and growing trend towards business
process outsourcing and off-shoring of customer care processes, finance and accounting
functions, as well as travel-related management services. However, Balakrishnan et al.
(2008) reveal that outsourcing service tasks is constrained by the nature of customer
contact. They warn against outsourcing a high skill, high in-person contact process.
Similarly, when applying mass customisation to services (i.e. building service offerings
on a base package of standard service modules to meet specific requirements),
Pekkarinen and Ulkuniemi (2008) emphasise that modularity should not be visible to the
customer so as that the total service package appears individual to him or her. To
address the issue of customer contact in service postponement, the next section will look
into the line of visibility between the front office and back office operations.
The line of visibility in services
Customer contact with the service process (occurring either in the physical presence of
the customer or in the indirect contact via electronic media such as telephone, mail and
the web) has been considered as a defining dimension of the design of services (Shostack,
1984; Metters and Vargas, 2000). The level of customer contact directly affects
conformance quality and productivity performance (Chase, 1981; Harvey, 1998). In
relation to this, managing service operations often has to decide how work should be
divided between the front and back offices, with the former responsible for the
high-contact elements of work and the latter taking care of the low-contact elements. The
back office processes are removed from customer view and can be designed for
efficiency, while front office must focus on satisfactory customer experiences (Collier
and Meyer, 1998). One natural way to improve efficiency is thus to identify and shift
additional service activities to the back office. It should be noted that this is different
from the deployment of the push-pull boundary thinking into services, as the push-pull
boundary implies that all push activities take place before pull activities. Front office
and back office operations can take place serially or in parallel.
To facilitate our discussion, we use a service blueprint originally proposed by
Shostack (1984), which involves drawing a line of visibility separating front office
operations from back office operations. The service blueprint helps companies like IBM
and Aramark to identify possible failure points, improve existing services and develop
new services (Shostack, 1984; Bitner et al., 2008). Figure 2 is an example of a blueprint
for a one-night hotel stay. The physical evidence that customers come in contact with is
the tangibles that can influence their quality perception. There are also support
processes including the reservation systems that affect the customer experience. The
line of visibility separates the onstage/visible contact employee actions from the
backstage/invisible contact employee actions.

Service
postponement

477

JMTM
21,4

Ad/
website

Physical
evidence

478
Customer
actions

Make
reservation

Hotel
exterior
parking

Arrive
at
hotel

Cart for
bags
employee
dress

Give bags
to
bellperson

Desk
paperwork
lobby
key

Elevators
hallways
room

Check
in

Go to
room

Line of interaction
Onstage/
visible
contact
employee
actions

Figure 2.
Blueprint for a one-night
hotel stay

Greet
and
take bags

Process
registration

Line of visibility

Backstage/
invisible
contact
employee
actions

Make
reservation
for guest

Support
processes

Reservation
system

Take bags
to room

Line of internal interaction

Registration
system

Source: Bitner et al. (2008)

We now turn back to service postponement. In addition to common, standard and

modular design in the initial manufacturing process as shown in Figure 1,
manufacturing postponement can also be achieved by re-arranging the steps along
the supply chain in the most efficient sequence, often resulting in the re-location of the
push-pull boundary. The rationale of this is to delay those activities which can benefit
from the availability of the further information about customer demands. Thus, only
those information-related activities should be placed downstream the push-pull
boundary (i.e. in the pull proportion of a supply chain) (Yang and Burns, 2003). Consider
the case of Benetton in Figure 3. Traditionally, the yarn was first dyed into different
colours and then knitted into finished garments. There were always too many garments
in colours customers did not want, whereas colours in demand were always sold out. To
cope with fickle fashion trends, Benetton change the order of the dyeing and knitting
sub-processes since they can forecast aggregated demands of a certain size (related to
knitting) more accurately. In this way, they postpone dyeing until when they gain a
better understanding of the popular colours for a season. This postponement strategy
leads to inventory reduction, better customer service and fewer write-offs (Lee, 1998).
A similar line of reasoning as in manufacturing postponement above can be adopted
when considering how to locate the line of visibility. This is particularly the case for the
expanding presence of internet-based services, where the line between front- and

Spin or purchase yarn

Spin or purchase yarn

Dye yarn

Manufacturing garment parts

Finish yarn

Push-pull boundary

Join parts

Manufacturing garment parts

Dye garment

Join parts

Finish garments

(a) Before postponement

(b) After postponement

back-office is being blurred, with on- and off-line activities becoming more integrated in
some situations and more de-coupled in others (Metters and Vargas, 2000). When and
how to move the line of visibility is a crucial issue in developing an effective service
operation (Karwan and Markland, 2006). Following the postponement thinking, service
companies are encouraged to re-examine the activities that should be done in view of the
customer and those that could be pushed to the back office. For example, keeping in view
the developments in ICTs, what are those human interaction activities in the process
which can be automated? One of the main considerations would be to look at those dataor document-intensive front office operations, which are usually amenable to
automation and use of technology. With this in mind, can tasks performed in the
presence of the customer be shifted to the back office? With the help of available ICTs
(e.g. using online processing), the line of visibility can also be pushed back to the point
where existing (human) resources may be able to adequately deal with front office issues
(Karwan and Markland, 2006). In an e-commerce environment, the line of visibility can
be considered to be drawn on the web pages. As most transactions are moved to the back
office, it can be natural to seek opportunities to increase efficiency such as evident in risk
pooling (Eppen, 1979). For example, the allocation of resources becomes easier in
e-commerce because they can be matched with aggregate demand rather than dealing
with wide fluctuation in demand at individual locations. The transparency of part of the
service process previously occurring below the line of visibility could also have a
favorable impact on customer service quality. In practice, the line of visibility has been
deliberately moved to let customers see what was previously hidden from them
particularly in industries plagued by poor workmanship and shoddy business practices
(Harvey, 1998). At ebay, a buyer is allowed to rate and comment on the service of the
seller, when purchasing an item. This provides the very strong incentive for sellers to
provide good service, as any incident of late shipment, failure to ship or dishonest
representation will immediately be available to all to see.
Conclusions and suggestions for further research
This paper has attempted to provide initial thoughts on how to extend and adapt the
postponement concept to service operations. We have shown that postponement
strategies developed in manufacturing have a potential for service performance akin to

Service
postponement

479

Figure 3.
Postponement application
in Benetton

JMTM
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480

what is expected of manufacturing organisation. A focus on postponement at the

service push-pull boundary can increase the amount of process steps to complete in
advance, thus reducing costs and shortening service delivery time. This paper has also
investigated the role of postponement in moving the line of visibility between front
office and back office operations. Compared to manufacturing, there may be fewer
constraints on the sequence in which service operations are performed. While this
paper offers the opportunity of new ways of thinking about service operations, more
rigorous development of theory including empirical analyses is needed to substantiate
these initial thoughts on exploiting the service aspects of postponement.
As an early attempt to transfer the body of knowledge in manufacturing
postponement to service operations, this paper has considered all or most services in one
big category and discussed the role of postponement for all of them. This might imply
some further research opportunities, as there are many identified sector-specific
characteristics of services which should be explicitly considered when looking into the
applicability of postponement beyond manufacturing. The banking sector appears to
provide a good starting point as it is much researched particularly in organising
front office and back office operations. This sector also exhibits some of the typical
consequences of technological developments.
The decoupling of forecasting-based activities from customer-induced activities
could also be introduced to the service blueprint complementing the line of visibility. For
example, some activities such as advisements and web sites in Figure 2, which may be
visible to customers, can be considered as forecasting-based activities and organised for
efficiency. In this respect, these activities may be placed under the line of internal
interactions (i.e. support processes). Further work could also focus on how to adapt and
formulate the push-pull boundary concept in a service setting, particularly to
incorporate the characteristics of customer contact in the service production and
delivery process.
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Corresponding author
Biao Yang can be contacted at: by505@york.ac.uk
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