Discussion Board Reply

Please create a thoughtfull and articulate response to this students Discussion Baord Post:

Hello everyone,

My project is on expanding my family’s business, a Montessori preschool, through opening small centers on a rolling basis. Our business provides a service in the form of Montessori education, a developmentally based enrichment program and childcare.

Our business’ approach to service design is based on the objectives of cost and efficiency. According to Stevenson (2018), this is the “product design approach” to developing services. Parents have limited resources and it is important that a center is affordable. By maintaining low overhead and costs, the service can remain affordable.

According to Stevenson (2018), there are 9 characteristics of a well designed service system. Following these guidelines, our service will be consistent with our mission, to educate the whole child. The service will be user friendly, easy to sustain and, as previously explained, cost effective. There will be an obvious value to the customer: high quality education and care that will give their children the best possible start. Our service is a “front of the house operation”, with direct contact with families who use our service (Stevenson, 2018). The unifying theme is quality; our business strives to provide the best possible education and child care at an affordable rate. The design features are formal and informal surveys, regular evaluations of the children to ensure they are demonstrating progress, and evaluations of all teacher, staff and volunteers.

The quality of the service is an “intangible” related to the service package, there will be limited options available (Stevenson, 2018). Parents can choose full day or half day programs, and the number of days their children will attend, but the start times for the day are set and the days their children are enrolled are dependent on availability. Parents have also stated they want to opt out of the enrichment program and the educational component of the service, but both are included in the program. The flexibility improves the quality of the service provided, but comes at the cost of convince to the customer (Stevenson, 2018).

Thank you!

References:
Stevenson, W. J. (2018). Operations Management, Thirteenth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.