1. Special considerations in designing the production processes in the services sector:
The services sector differs markedly from the industrial sector in terms of consumption of the
production. In industrial sector, the produced units can wait for some time / day before getting consumed
(Example - Manufacturing and selling of televisions). But in services sector, the production and
consumption happens at the same time (Example - Bank counters).
In order to meet this unique requirement, while designing the service process, special consideration as
enlisted below should be taken care of:
1) The service productivity is significantly dependent on how well the queue is being managed. Hence it
is imperative to have ideal amount of resources to balance the queue and service them. This could be
done by balancing both the arrival rate as well as service resources.
2) Understand the peak time demand for the services. Try to spread the peak to non-peak time by
introducing some perks for arriving in the non-peak time.
3) Even after that, it is expected to have a higher demand in the peak time. To cater to the needs, it must
be serviced with more service desks (or) faster service rates.
3a) More service desks could be made possible with flexible work time scheduling for the
employees across multiple shifts.
3b) Faster service rates could be achieved during peak hours by offloading a part of the back-end
activitity to the non-peak hour demand time.
2. Design of production process is a long-term decision:
Designing a production process is always a long-term decision. Generally the operations strategy will
guide the kind of production that is required in a particular services setup. Based on that the process will
be established. Team will be designed and onboarded based on that and then it will be standardized with
the required systems & tools. In this flow, since the production design preceeds multiple other following
steps, any changes to the production design will kick in cascading effect on the subsequent tasks. Hence
it is least prefered to changing the production process quite often.