Services touch the lives of every person in this country every day: food services, communication services, and emergency services, to name only a few. Our welfare and the welfare of our economy are now based on services. The activities of manufacturing and agricultura always will be necessary, but we can eat only so much food and we can use only so many goods. Services, however, are largely experiential, and we will always have a limitless appetite for them. Service operations management is firmly established as a field of study that embraces all service industries. For example, under the leadership of the senior author of this text, the discipline was recognized as an academic field and designated as a separate track by the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) at its 1987 Boston meeting. In 1989 the lnternational Journal of Service Industry Management was inaugurated. Finally, the First International Service Research Seminar in Service Management was held in France, in 1990, drawing participants from the fields of operations management, marketing, and organizational behavior. Following the 1996 Orlando DSI service mini-conference, a Web site (http://soma.byu.edu) was established to support faculty and students interested in the field of service management. The Journal of Service Research was first published in August 1998 and quickly hecame the leading journal of the field. At the 2004 Boston meeting of Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), a College on Service Operations was established. In 2005 the IBM Almaden Research Center launched an initiative to establish a new discipline called Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME). Visit the Academic initiative SSME Web site at http://www.ibm.com/ university/ssme to find articles, case studies, and leeture materials.