About Dr. Bill Bleuel

Education:

BSEE, Carnegie Mellon University;

MS, Statistics, University of Rochester;

PhD, Industrial Engineering, Texas A&M University.

Business/Academic Experience:

Dr. Bleuel has held executive positions in engineering, marketing and service management at Xerox, Taylor Instrument Company and Barber Colman Company. Dr. Bleuel has also had experience as general manager in two start-up companies that he co-founded. He has published three textbooks, Service Planning (Amacom), Service Management (Instrument Society), and his most recent textbook, After the Sale (The Solomon Press).  He has been the Franz Edelman Award winner by The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), he received the Armitage Medal from the Society of Logistics Engineers, and the Patton Publication Award. He became a Luckman Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Pepperdine and more recently received the Julian Virtue Award.

Areas of Interest:

With a background in engineering, executive positions in industry and university faculty position in business, Dr. Bleuel brings a wide range of expertise to business problems.

Dr. Bleuel’s areas of expertise and engagement have included:

Call Center Performance Optimization

Although most call centers have comprehensive metrics, the mathematics of queuing are rarely understood. With a strong background in queuing theory, I've been able to dramatically increase productivity and reduce the stress in call centers.

Customer Loyalty/Satisfaction Improvement/Measurement Programs

Most companies have some metric that indicates customer satisfaction and or loyalty. Guiding a number of high technology companies, I have been able to provide them with guidance that dramatically improved the relative importance in benchmark surveys. One example was a printer company that ranked last in the Benchmark study but after a re-alignment of their service priorities they were tied with the top satisfaction rating in the industry within three years.

Customer/Product Service Management Operations

Two of the three books I've written are specifically aimed at product service operations. The books were the outcome of combining academic training with on-the-job experience in three high technology firms (Xerox Corporation, Taylor Instrument company, and Barber Colman company).  Often the executives have risen to the top through experiential learning.  By combining that experience with basic theories of management science dramatically improves performance.

Customer/Product Service Planning 

Many service organizations have excellent skills in dealing with customers in managing service operations. However, many of them lack planning skills which can dramatically change the way they run their business. In one instance I counseled the head of a large service organization to change its service contracts from a single guaranteed response time at a single price to a menu of alternative response time contracts. The result was an increase in bottom line profitability of more than $100,000 per year and increased customer satisfaction.

Expert Witness

I have been involved as an expert witness for more than 20 years. Most of the cases I was involved in revolve around intellectual property conflicts and technology companies. Most recently I was involved in evaluating the value of a specific type of search engine impact on revenue and customer satisfaction.  I showed that the search engine did, in fact, improve revenue and customer satisfaction.  Other cases required me to examine the impact of service operations by an independent service company on customer satisfaction in order to demonstrate that the independent service company provided equal or higher satisfaction than manufacturer.

Service Business Forecasting

Many companies are not familiar with the complexities of business forecasting will forecast future performance based on current performance within a simple factor added to reflect changes in the economy. The simple forecasting model, often referred to as the naïve model, may either overestimate or underestimate the actual performance of the company.  Thus, the company may overspend in one case of not have sufficient resource in the other case.  By improving the forecast of service operations both personnel and inventory can often be dramatically reduced or optimized.  For example, a simple forecasting model that I developed when I worked at Xerox reduced trunk inventory (parts carried by technicians I the trunk of their car) by approximately $300 per automobile. At that time there were 12,000 automobiles in the fleet for service technicians.  By implementing this forecasting model Xerox translated this into a savings of approximately 3 1/2 million dollars.