The characteristic of an outstanding service organization is the continued effort it devotes to widening the gap between itself and its major competitors on both service quality and productivity. This involves large numbers of people, ranging from front-line personnel to the CEO and middle managers.

The main challenge that managers of service operations cite is the difficulty, compared to manufacturing industries, of controlling the quality. They often go further to attribute their difficulties to the fact that many services are delivered at the same time as they are produced, frequently by the same person.

Lean service management is the managerial approach which CBE brings to its clients in order to take their operations on a journey towards continuous improvement of quality and productivity.