Congruence Mapping of the Activity Flows Allocated in Built Environments: A Pilot Application of Under-Development Software in an Emergency-Care Service

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It is delight to have a chance of having read your paper, aiming to explore whether the software, which is being developed, would be applicable to one of complex organizations such as an A&E department.

However, it needs to be developed in order to be published to the public as follows:

1. In the introduction, it is not clear the paper’s aim. The introduction chapter has been written long enough, but it is vague what you are talking about. Especially, it looks like a part of literature review. For example, 1.2 would be appropriate to the section of literature review regarding to various methodologies which have been used and tested in many works; 1.1 might be summarized, raise a question of how difficult for researchers to assess the complexity of A&E department, and describe why this study would be important; and in the section of 1.3, it does not mention about hypotheses, objectives, or findings…the contents do not correspond to the title of the section. Should clarify the background, purpose of this work, and how to contribute to the built environment...

2.  Regarding methodologies, it is quite hard for me to follow the methodological descriptions.   It seems to be not important, but there are some incongruences; in the line of 198, it is mentioned “four values”, but there are only three values in the table 1…so that it needs to be carefully checked again; in the table 1, it is not clear what difference between “a means activity” and “the end activity”, it needs to be described; in the line of 232, you mentioned 15 key healthcare professionals, but there are only 13 professionals in the table 3; in the line of 234, it is not clear what the interview dynamics mean in hear (it should be clarified what this means in somewhere); in the line of 236, “the support material” is mentioned, but it is unknown what it is, and how it has been used in the process of interview; at the relationships row in the table 4, relationships value is used…but you do not provide any idea of what the value means; in the figure 4, “PPE desequip room”…what is PPE desequip?; in the figure 4, also, what the color codes mean, and the numbers do as well?; in the figure 5, what is “kanban meeting”?;  

3. In the discussion and conclusion chapter, you did not suggest any substantial results of the pilot study. Although some findings are mentioned in the lines between 391 to 401, it iw quite unclear how it might be applicable especially to the A&E Department.

4. Reconsider the whole structure of the paper. It should be improved in more ligical and concise ways. 

5. Regarding the proficiency of language, it is necessary for you to improve the contents because many parts have a difficulty in understanding. 

Author Response

Por favor, verifique o anexo

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

good work but could have been even better if the results were utilized further in design guidance that helps overcome the danger of trial and error that characterizes such aspects and their analyses - maybe subject for a follow-up paper? 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

1. The paper should be proofread to correct all grammatical and syntax errors.

2. Authors should avoid using personal pronouns in scientific writing. In addition, it would be good to explain all abbreviations at their first mention. For instance, SE and FM.

3. In the Abstract, it would be good to indicate the practical contributions of this study. Currently, this is not clearly stated in the paper.

4. In the introduction, the author(s) could consider looking at what work has been done on mapping the activity flows in the built environment. This could help build the key gaps that necessitate the current research. Currently, this is not clearly stated.

5. The methodology section should be improved. For the interviews, how were the interviewees selected? What were the criteria for selecting the respondents? Etc.

6. The discussion of the findings is not robust enough. More insights could be drawn from the findings to improve the quality of the paper. In addition, the authors should indicate how the findings in this study relate to the available literature.

7. In the conclusion section, the authors could improve this section to introduce the practical contribution of the paper. How different is this study from other existing studies? What is the novelty of the current study?

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your exhaustible and substantial revision. 
One thing that you need to consider is the color schemes mentioned in line 587 in the discussion section, "...to identify mandatory passages (value 1,, yellow, in Table 1) to test...". I think green color shows the value of one. Could you check this out again for the consistency? 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

I made the adjustment you suggested:

"One thing that you need to consider is the color schemes mentioned in line 587 in the discussion section, "...to identify mandatory passages (value 1,, yellow, in Table 1) to test...". I think green color shows the value of one. Could you check this out again for the consistency? "

The color indication was wrong and the correct color is green. We corrected it in the manuscript.

Thank you very much for reading carefully

Regards