How low Should You Go? - Conceptualization of the Service Granularity Framework

With an ongoing division of labor and concentration on core competencies in logistics, the flexibility and quality in logistics services can be increased in terms of contracting specialists for each step in a supply chain. In order to participate in such an environment and act successfully on the market, it is essential for logistics service providers to follow a service oriented paradigm and modularize their service portfolio from static end-to-end solutions to a flexible set of modular services. One of the main challenges is to find a ’suitable’ level of granularity for the modularization of existing logistics services. In this paper a conceptual framework of service granularity levels is developed. A systematic literature review is conducted in order to find existing concepts of service granularity. Findings are analyzed and finally synthesized towards their suitability for logistics services. Domain specific composition is supported by the logistics service map concept that contains catalog and construction kit for modular services. The paper’s contribution is a Service Granularity Framework dedicated to specialized scholars of service science and practitioners of logistics.