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Top1. Introduction
This paper studies the design of the structure of complex services provided by multilevel enterprises. It begins by characterizing the problem under consideration and reviewing cases that show the complexity of providing comprehensive structure design solutions, to discover research opportunities for improving such designs.
Multilevel enterprises providing complex services have several organizational levels that take the form of a central management component and several structure levels such as divisions, products, service lines, and locations. Such levels usually form a sort of hierarchy, with several branches that may be completely independent of each other, but there are cases in which they interact by exchanging goods, services, and clients. The problem of interest is how to design such services founded on knowledge generated by the design, implementation, and evaluation of real-world cases. The purpose is to provide new design ideas, based on such evidence, further characterized subsequently.
Specific real examples of services of the type just outlined, which show the design challenge and different design approaches, are as follows.
- a)
Services To the Elderly in Holland that have a design of bundles of services, such as (de Blok et al., 2014):
• Psychiatric care, including components as “monitoring, scaling up, intensify care and crisis intervention”.
• Medication care, with components as “long lasting medication collected at preset times and regular medication collected from the pharmacy.
This case shows the need to assemble a particular service for a user by selecting the proper components according to his needs. For such assembling, they use protocols that guide the different operating and management units to define what is relevant for each situation.
- b)
Shipping Services provided by a European company (Pekarinen and Ulkuniemi, 2008) have two business lines:
• “Subcase A that moves physical goods in large shipments for the fashion and health care industries by using outsourcing and partnerships”
• “Subcase B that moves physical goods in small shipments for manufacturing industries by using its fleet”.
In Subcase A, the services’ design provides customized versions for several industries. Since the logistics needs for them are different, “similarities in customer needs are considered to build cost-efficient solutions”. For example, service modules for “offerings in order management, supply chain management, and vendor inventory management” designs are the same for all industries. In Subcase B, the design defines “highly standardized services with over 50 modules, but complemented with personalized value-added services that provide some customization”. Examples of the different standardized process modules that the design contains are: “goods pick up, loading, transporting, unloading and delivery, sending and receiving orders, tracking shipments, and control and monitoring processes”. The design includes an IT service platform that facilitates the creation of particular assemblies of services for different clients.
- c)
Integrated Practice Units, defined by Lee & Porter (2013) based on the experience of several large USA hospitals that successfully innovated in the redesign of their medical production flows. The design of a practice unit is for a given clinical condition, e.g. low back pain, and uses a well-designed specialized medical flow, which clearly defines what to do for a patient’s condition. Some work of this type has also been done for emergencies, including the introduction of split flows specialized by type of patients in hospitals in the USA (Saghafian et al., 2012), and Chile (Barros, Riffo, & Paredes, 2019).
The cases presented allow identifying the subsequent design levels.