James R. Evans is professor emeritus of operations, business analytics and information systems in the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, having retired after over 43 years on the faculty. He holds BSIE and MSIE degrees from Purdue University and a doctoral degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech. He has been involved in numerous professional societies throughout his career and he served as president of the Decision Sciences Institute from 1997-1998. He also served 11 years on the Board of Examiners and Panel of Judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and was active in the Partnership for Excellence, the Ohio-based Baldrige initiative. He has been the editor of the Quality Management Journal, published by the American Society for Quality, and served on editorial boards of numerous other journals. Dr. Evans has published 100 refereed papers in major academic journals and more than 50 editions of 20 textbooks in diverse areas of business including quality management, Six Sigma, simulation and risk analysis and business analytics. During the annual Quality Congress in May 2004, the American Society for Quality presented Dr. Evans and coauthor Dr. William Lindsay with the Philip B. Crosby Medal for writing The Management and Control of Quality, 5th Edition. The Crosby medal was presented for authoring a distinguished book contributing significantly to the extension of the philosophy and application of the principles, methods, and techniques of quality management. He also received the 2018 Lindner Research Excellence Award from the College of Business at the University of Cincinnati and the 2019 Baldrige Foundation Leadership Award for Excellence in Education.

David A. Collier retired in 2017 as the Eminent Scholar, Alico Chair in Operations Management, at the Lutgert College of Business, Florida Gulf Coast University. Dr. Collier earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering and M.B.A. from the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. in production and operations management from The Ohio State University. Dr. Collier previously taught at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University and the University of Warwick in England. Dr. Collier has received five awards for outstanding journal articles and has written and published eight invited book chapters. Seven of Dr. Collier's cases have been reprinted in major marketing and operations management textbooks and several of his articles have been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review 10 Must Reads series. He has more than 80 refereed publications and has published in journals such as Management Sciences, Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Production & Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Business Horizons, Journal of Service Science and International Journal of Service Industry Management. Dr. Collier's research has more than 32,000 reads and 4,000 citations, according to Research Gate. Dr. Collier has authored six books on service, quality and operations management, including this text, Service Management: The Automation of Services, Service Management: Operating Decisions, The Service/Quality Solution: Using Service Management to Gain Competitive Advantage, Operations Management: Goods, Services and Value Chains and OM6. After decades of authoring academic articles and textbooks, Dr. Collier has embarked on a new challenge: writing novels that make a difference.