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to their goals and preferences. As such, an organization providing HWC services should
arrange its care and service processes in such a way that they explicitly and adequately
cater to the needs and requirements of elderly clients (Van Wijk, 2007).
Finally, when examining an elderly client’s needs for housing, welfare and (long term)
care, organizations often tend to make strict distinctions between these main pillars
of care and service provision (Brodsky et al., 2002). However, for an individual elderly
client, these services are interrelated since they all enable an elderly person to continue
to live independently as long as possible. Therefore, when taking client demand as
the basis for care and service provision, HWC services need to be provided as an
integral and coherent package. For providers, this implies they jointly have to deliver
an optimal package of HWC services as an integral answer to the multiple needs of
their elderly clients.
To sum up, a variety of needs exist among elderly clients and over the life course of an
individual. To both recognize and manage this diversity, segmentation of the elderly
population can be of help. Furthermore, to fulfill an individual elderly client’s needs in
a demand-based manner requires organizations to develop choice options and variety,
and joint provision of HWC services. In addition, organizations should interact with
elderly clients in order to determine their individual needs and wants, and be able to
act upon them. Having determined several important implications of demand-based
care on the operational level, it is time to look for principles and practices that will
help HWC providers in dealing with these specifics. We turn therefore, to the field of
OM; this field specifically addresses the organizational level where goods and services
are actually delivered to the client. To get an idea of its contents, we will give a general
introduction to OM in the next section.
2.3 Operations management
Operations management (OM) covers a body of knowledge that focuses on the
design, functioning and improvement of a firm’s operations function, where the term
‘operations’ refers to the use of resources, e.g. capital, materials, technology, human
skills and knowledge, for the production and delivery of products, which can be either
goods or services (Schellekens, 2004). According to Slack et al. (2007) the operations
function is one of the three core functions of any organization, along with the marketing
and sales function and the product development function. The former is responsible
for communicating the firm’s products to the market; the latter for creating goods and
services for the market. The operations function comprises all the activities that are
involved in the transformation of inputs into outputs, thereby realizing the products
that are the reason for the organization’s existence. As such, the operations function
D
emand-based pr
ovision
of housing
, w
elfar
e
and car
e
Chapt
er 2
32
is responsible for fulfilling customer requests throughout the production and delivery
of goods and services (Slack et al., 2007). Some examples of topics that have been
widely researched in this respect are scheduling and sequencing of processes, workflow
management, inventory control and performance measurement.
Besides constituting a natural client focus, OM goes beyond an organization’s strategic
level by transferring the aim of an organization into accompanying resources and
methods to work in daily practice. An organization can adapt or rearrange its
operational processes or the operational organization of products with the aim of
reaching the goals of its customers as well as the performance goals of the organization
itself (e.g. Meyer Goldstein et al., 2002, Bohmer, 2005, Zomerdijk and De Vries, 2007).
In the day-to-day production and delivery of products, common operational objectives
are quality, cost,
flexibility, speed and reliability.
2.3.1 Operations management in services
OM studies both manufacturing organizations, producing goods such as vehicles,
canned food and clothing, and service organizations, producing services such as
insurance, entertainment and health care. The main distinction between goods and
services is the indispensable involvement of the client in service supply (Lovelock
and Gummesson, 2004, Edvardsson et al., 2005, Sampson and Froehle, 2006). The
participation of the client in the service production process will influence the whole
process of service provision, from specification of the desired services to actual service
delivery. Therefore, it is not only important what is being delivered to the client, for
example a quick, cheap meal at a fast-food take-away or an exclusive haute cuisine
dinner at a five star restaurant, but also how the service is being delivered, for instance,
how the service professional treats the client and how the client is involved in service
production. The service product and service process are two complementary and
intertwined elements in final service provision (Kellogg and Nie, 1995, Verma et al.,
1999). Other service characteristics that typically influence the design, functioning
and improvement of service systems and processes are simultaneity of production
and consumption, heterogeneity, perishability and intangibility (Fitzsimmons and
Fitzsimmons, 2006).
In order to address the operational challenges of service organizations, the field of
service operations management emerged. Like OM in manufacturing operations,
service operations management constitutes designing, operating and improving
the productive systems of the organization (Zomerdijk, 2005). On the one hand,
service operations management covers principles that were traditionally developed
for manufacturing, thus stemming directly from OM (see, for example, Bowen and
Youngdahl, 1998, Meyer and DeTore, 1999, De Blok et al., 2007). On the other hand,
Modular
Care Provision