Alternative Quantitative Approaches for Designing Modular Services: A Comparative Analysis of Steward’s Partitioning and Tearing Approach

Abstract

Modularisation is a possibility to design work sharing services which gains increasing attention in the field of service research (cf. [2, pp. 221]; [3, pp. 811]). The basic concept is to merge single tasks of the underlying service into service modules in such a way, that costs are minimised and that the service supplier is simultaneously enabled to serve a heterogeneous spectrum of customer needs. Because of the integrated nature of the co-production of services by service supplier and customers, the relevant costs are coordination costs¹, which arise when interdependent tasks are to be fulfilled by different actors, or when these tasks are not completely complementary. In the context of service production, tasks can be combined to service modules up to such a module size, that existing interdependencies are still minimal in terms of coordination costs. Higher coordination costs only occur, if interdependent tasks are assigned to different modules and when the activities, which different actors are responsible for, need do be adjusted.