Richard B. Chase is Professor Emeritus of Operations Management Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California Ph.D., MBA, B.S., UCLA. He specializes in service operations management which involves applying concepts from OM, organizational theory, and services marketing to the design of service processes. He devised the customer contact theory for service organization. He is known for the McGraw-Hill-published Production & Operations Management series book on Operations and Supply Chain with the 13th edition being co-authored with R. Jacobs. With versions in seven different languages, it is one of the world?s most widely used texts on the topic. His two most cited articles appeared in the Harvard Business Review. These are "Where Does the Customer Fit in a Service Operation?" and "The Service Factory". He has served on the faculties of the Harvard Business School, University of Arizona, UCLA, and IMD in Switzerland. and Decision Sciences Institute, and POMS.