The ninth edition continues to acknowledge and emphasize the essential uniqueness of service management. The text is organized in four parts: Part One: Understanding Services, which provides a historical context as well as distinguishes the distinctive characteristics of service operations; Part Two: Designing the Service Enterprise, which covers designing the service enterprise to support the competitive strategy; Part Three: Managing Service Operations that details topics such as Managing Capacity, Demand and Waiting Lines and Service Supply Relationships and; Part Four: Quantitative Models for Service Management that addresses forecasting and managing service inventory.