In recent years, governmental pressure on reducing the cost of drugs, together with the growth in the number of generic manufacturers, have given a considerable boost to competition in the pharmaceutical sector. Such relevant market change has highlighted the necessity of controlling and improving performance in order to reduce costs while maintaining high qualitylevels, both enhancing working capital management and increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of production lines (activities that had previously been somewhat neglected in the pharmaceutical sector). In this paper, the paradigm of buffer design for availability (BDFA)-an approach developed to conciliate these apparently conflicting strategies to achieve performance improvement and cost reduction-is briefly recalled and discussed, being contextualized in the state-of-the-art of buffer design research. Its valuable practical applicability and effectiveness is then demonstrated by the means of a real case study application, and future developments are eventually presented.
Service Science introduced the abstraction of service systems, which while jointly interacting can cocreate\ud
value. The term “cocreation” captures the collaborative nature of value creation. Whilst value, between two\ud
or more service entities, is always cocreated, value-cocreation is rarely considered in designing a service\ud
even though this is a main design driver that leads to successful construction of Value Propositions1 (VP).\ud
The presence of multiple channels (in-person, phone, and web) may give rise to opportunities for enhanced\ud
value-cocreation. Still, different channels may lead the beneficiary of the service to interact as a value coproducer,\ud
linking value-cocreation to his/her capability to properly perform the service. The authors explore\ud
the opportunity to increase the value cocreated in a service process through improved design using multiple\ud
channels. The authors develop a method that guides service designers in the construction of more effective\ud
multichannel Value Propositions, increasing the opportunities to enhance the cocreation of value. This paper\ud
should be of value to both researchers and practitioners looking for new ways to construct effective multichannel\ud
Value Propositions
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