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clear when the client was involved in this process (columns 2–4); and (b) an overview
of the various employees executing an activity, which indicates the degree of decoupling
(columns 5–9). The data revealed the following interesting points.
Most activities are BO
Older clients usually intend to stay independent as long as possible. It is not always easy
to determine exactly what their needs are to make a longer stay at home possible, and
these clients often find it hard to express their needs in terms of care or welfare services
required. To ease the exchange of information, care providers engage in activities that
display compassion, high levels of empathy, trust and sympathy. Therefore specifying a
client’s constraints and tailoring care and assistance services to overcome these constraints
are appropriate FO tasks. However, this case study showed that many of these activities
are conducted in the BO. Thus, there is only one brief moment of contact in which clients
can express their needs and wishes, which probably leads to inadequate specifications
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Table 3.5 Design of the current process
Process step
C
FO
BO
CCA
DCA
Care
managers
Team
manager
EP
Announcement
of demand for care
X
C receives a C-number; data sent to
district office
X
X
C data input
in system and some checks
X
X
Preliminary decision on type of care
needed
X
X
C assigned to a care team
X
X
Decision
in information system
X
X
Detailed specifications discussed with C
X
X
X
Final decision on the offer
X
X
Make
execution plan
X
X
Plan sent to professionals
X
X
Start execution
X
X
Evaluation
of the service
X
X
X
Revision of execution plan
X
X
X
Restart execution
X
X
C: client; BO: back office; FO: front office; CCA: central client administration; DCA: decentralized client administration;
EP: executing professional.
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and the risk of delivering ‘wrong’ care and services. This lowers both the quality and
efficiency of the process because it is likely that work will need to be performed again.
Low and late client involvement in specification process
The client is barely involved in the specification process, and then only relatively late
(see step 7 in Table 3.5, first column). As a result, the client’s needs and wishes can
only really be included in the process from this point onward. Moreover, tailoring
of the required care and services does not occur until delivery has begun. Because
of their low and rather late involvement, clients may perceive the current process as
taking place slowly (low speed) as they are not aware of the preparation involved in
the delivery of their care. In addition, they may not be impressed by the care received
(low quality) because really individualized packages are developed only some time
after the start of delivery.
High degree of decoupling
Five types of employee are involved in the current specification process. All perform
various tasks that ultimately lead to the delivery of a care package to a single older
client. The reason for all this decoupling is not clear. The many handovers cause a loss
of information that negatively influences the quality of the process. The narrowness of
the employees’ tasks may lead to inefficient use of resources, making the specification
process more expensive than needed.
Several divisions, one provider
An important finding was that there was no single, integrated access to all the care and
services available in the merged organization. Individual divisions have set up their
own specification lines to deliver information on their own care and services. If older
clients require services from multiple parts of the organization, they must contact
each of these divisions separately. Because of this non-transparency and fragmented
accessibility, clients may well be unaware of the full range of services available. The
company is also missing out on opportunities for cross-selling and the integral
specification of its care and services.
3.4.2 Towards new FO/BO designs
The newly merged organization discussed the options for improving accessibility to all
its services and, at the same time, delivering more transparent and customized services.
The framework (Table 3.3) served as a guide to explore how various FO/BO designs
could add to these objectives. Initial discussions revealed that the organization first
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needed a comprehensive understanding of the demands of their potential and present
clients and a clear display of the care and services and their various combinations, which
they could deliver as a merged organization (see also Johnston and Clark, 2005). How
could they deliver a customized and transparent care and service package to clients
if they did not know the range of demands and options themselves? During ongoing
discussions, the organization began analysing the characteristics of their customers’
demands, which resulted first in the identification of client segments, each based on
a particular demand (see also Gobbens et al., 2007). These gave a better overview of
the diversity of demand in their client population. Examples of older segments were
‘vital’, ‘lonely but coping’, and ‘needy’. Second, the company identified the complexity
of the demand in each client segment: how clear cut were the demands, how many
problems were involved and how far were these problems interrelated? In the case of
a high level of interrelatedness, they discussed what this implied for the delivery of
their services. Third, discussions in various divisions and levels of the organization led
to the development of generic packages of integrated services. Most of the identified
client segments were then assigned their own generic package (except those client
segments where demand was substantially more diffuse or ambiguous; see below). Each
generic package consisted of several modules, represented here as a well-defined and
restricted set of care or service items, for example, ‘cleaning the house’, ‘wound care’,
‘meals-on-wheels’. In summary, the first part of the project resulted in the creation of
generic packages for specific patient segments. The modular structure of these packages
particularly improved the transparency of what the organization offered. Depending on
the specific needs and wants of an individual client, modules are added or withdrawn
from the generic package of the segment in a final phase of fine-tuning.
The second part of the project focused on redesigning the specification phase. The
company saw little diversity in demand for the main part of their population and
assessed the complexity of the demand in most segments as moderate. They developed
a design – similar to Configuration III in Table 3.3 – in which FO employees list the
specific needs and wishes of a client and categorize them in terms of a certain segment.
If clients had any additional needs, the FO employees could customize the service they
received by making use of generic packages. In most cases, FO employees could decide
on their own which customization was appropriate, and recorded their findings and
decisions in a database. Only rarely did an extension of a generic package need to be
discussed with a BO employee. As a result, the organization chose Configuration III
of the FO/BO designs to improve the overall accessibility and customization of their
service delivery for the largest part of their population. In the few situations where BO
employees
were consulted, the organization applied Configuration IV (Table 3.3).
However, as mentioned above, the company also identified client segments with
a more diffuse and ambiguous demand. Obviously, they could not apply a generic
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