Evaluate whether Service Blueprinting is a Useful Tool for Operations Management
Operation management is a fairly well-established field with a diverse range of tools at the disposal of the managers. However, the ongoing shift from the product-based towards a service-based approach in customer interaction revealed the gaps in the suitability of these tools for service-based models. Several attempts have been made to address the issue, including the adjustments in the existing instruments and the introduction of the new ones. The following paper contains a review of a project blueprint example followed by the analysis of its usefulness for the operation management field.
Service Blueprint Example
Rationale
The draft above illustrates a service that allows customers to search for the cars that travel to a certain destination to share the cost of the ride and thus minimize the expenses associated with the trip. The online nature of the service means that throughout service use, the customer has few to no visible interactions with the company’s employees. Also, unlike similar services such as Uber, carpooling does not offer profit opportunities for customers with cars, so the involvement of various systems and regulations is minimal. Finally, the service is largely automated, relying on the algorithms and customer behavior pattern analysis, thus further decreasing the involvement of the employees. Nevertheless, the service blueprint offers several advantages for the operations managers. First, the success of the service at the initial stage depends on several factors that do not necessarily correspond to the activities performed by the company staff. For instance, the buildup of the customer base depends not only on the efforts of the marketing team but also on the perception of the audience formed by associated entities, such as the social media groups oriented at related activities (e.g. Couchsurfing) and tourism services that promote carpooling as one of the transportation options.
Unless acknowledged early in the planning process, this issue may seriously impact the expected rate of customer base buildup. Next, several bottlenecks exist in the service establishment and implementation, such as the introduction of third-party data analysis services. While these options are not necessarily required, it is possible that they can play a definitive role in gaining a competitive advantage since without them the performance of the service will be determined mostly by the end-user proficiency with using service features. Without external guidance, such a situation contains significant risks and is unacceptable to be left unaddressed. Therefore, its priority needs to be determined at the planning stage and allocated adequate resources, which can be done much easier with the help of the blueprint at hand. Another useful feature that is offered by the blueprint is the clear presentation of the overall implementation sequence. It should be considered that coordination of the process is among the responsibilities of the operation managers, and the blueprint can assist the process by minimizing confusion and providing clear guidance on the sequence of the necessary steps and, more importantly, the distribution of responsibilities among the personnel.
Finally, despite the scarcity of interaction between the employees and the customers, the intersection points can be crucial for meeting customer expectations. Moreover, the backstage activities often serve as essential components of superior customer experience, which is responsible for customer retention. The blueprint is useful for the identification of these points and, more importantly, provides the means of detecting shortcomings of the system in the process of the service’s functioning. In other words, it serves as a tool for timely identification and evaluation of the weak points and provides the managers with the opportunities for readjusting the service performance without compromising its functionality. These capabilities also apply to the detection of the activities that have the greatest effect on customer experience. In other words, they allow capitalizing on the most valuable elements of the service and readjusting resource allocation to maximize the efficiency of the most important points in the process delivery.
Evaluation
The description above provides an overview of how a specific blueprint can be of use for the involved operation managers. It can be argued that to a certain extent the outlined benefits apply to most of the areas where the blueprints can be used. For instance, the advantages of sequence illustration and strength and weaknesses identification are almost universal and are expected to be valuable in most settings that involve services. Nevertheless, to definitively establish its value in the field, a detailed evaluation of its usefulness is required. Such evaluation must recognize all important aspects of the practice and assess their value individually.
Alignment with Service Qualities
One of the important differences between services and products is that the former takes up a certain period and may develop in a non-linear way. Simply put, services are processes that may involve multiple stakeholders and are thus considerably complex. Therefore, the visual tools that are traditionally used by operation managers to depict a product cycle can be applied to the description of processes only to a certain degree and with several limitations. Most notably, these tools rarely acknowledge the direction of the action and/or its double-sided nature. To a certain degree, this issue can be addressed by using a simple flowchart that utilizes directional arrows as one of the figures. However, the fundamental principles of the flowchart construction do not reflect the nature of the service process and may create confusion. The most common example of such incompatibility is the situation where the service is described as moving through the supply chain, which would make sense for a tangible product but is more confusing when applied to the intangible domain (Sampson 2012). The service blueprint effectively eliminates this constraint by retaining the necessary components (e.g. the directional pictograms) and at the same time featuring several important adjustments (e.g. placing services in the center of the scheme), resulting in a tool that is more applicable to the intangible and dynamic nature of the processes. Therefore, the blueprinting process is valuable for developing an accurate concept.
Another important issue that can be derived from the information above is the definition of the stakeholders’ roles. The value creation process is not limited to the conscious effort of the employees directed at the customer – instead, it should be viewed as a complex set of interactions that occur at multiple levels. Besides, it is not necessarily reserved for the interaction between the service provider and the customers. From the carpooling example above, it becomes evident that for certain companies the interaction between customers serves as a primary source of services while the role of the organization is mostly limited to maintenance of the technical side of the relationships and the occasional management of the debatable situations (e.g. ensuring the justification of the refund requests or investigating the feedback disputes). These roles also need to be acknowledged to obtain a complete image of the intended service. It should be noted that while service blueprints are suitable for such a task, their functionality in this regard is fairly limited. Specifically, the blueprint allows the specification of different stakeholders and establishing the connection between them but does not offer the means of either explaining or documenting the nature of the relationship, thus relying on the proficiency of the manager who uses it (Sampson 2012). Thus, while the project blueprinting is generally consistent with the task, at least one of its aspects has space for improvement.
Finally, customer activity descriptions require the acknowledgment of several layers of interaction between the stakeholders. The most evident example of such layers is the distinction between the processes that are directly encountered by the customers and those that can only be evaluated based on their results. Due to the lack of direct contact, the latter can be either mistakenly viewed as unimportant or overlooked entirely. At the same time, a broad range of organizational activities relies on the latter category of interaction. The provided example of the carpooling service, in line with the majority of online services that rely on automated calculations and algorithms, illustrates a situation where the steps that cannot be seen by the customers are dominant. The service blueprint provides two advantages for such a setting. First, it recognizes the existence of such areas and offers specific methods of differentiating between them visually. This contributes to the accuracy of the service dynamics depiction and allows including the processes that could otherwise be omitted. Second, the resulting image serves not only as a way to recognize and roughly estimate the weight of the invisible contact area but also as a tool for progress monitoring at the latter stages.
Area-Specific Issues
In addition to the broad range of applications in the business sector, service blueprinting can be equally effective in the public administration segment. For the most part, the advantages described above translate to the non-profit organizations with a high degree of fidelity. Nevertheless, certain differences should be acknowledged. First, the service users mostly possess the same set of characteristics as the customers in the business setting. Therefore, their centrality can be compared to the priority of a customer-centered approach common in the contemporary business world. However, the presence of co-production as viewed from the service-dominant approach presumes the collaboration of the users and the organization as a necessary component of service delivery.
While this connection bears a certain similarity to the interaction between the customers and the service providers (as well as among the customers), it should be understood that in the case of non-profit organizations such a relationship is an unavoidable element due to nature of the offered services. Therefore, the implementation of the project blueprinting as means of accurate assessment of the possible becomes a necessity instead of a desirable option. Another important distinction is the growing complexity of the public service organization resulting from the steadily increasing number of involved stakeholders. While it does not necessarily create a new quality, it does create additional difficulties in planning and decision-making. In such cases, project blueprints are used primarily for clarification and minimization of uncertainties, although it can be argued that in the public administration setting it should be considered of higher importance.
Conclusion
To sum up, the project blueprint recognizes several important qualities of the service as a distinctive phenomenon, including its procedural nature, the diversity of stakeholder roles, and layers of customer interaction. For the operations management, this means the possibility of a more relevant modeling process that is superior both in terms of accuracy and accessibility for the rest of the stakeholders. While it is not fully representative of all the intricacies of the process it describes, its simplicity makes it a highly valuable tool for operation managers. It should also be pointed out that project blueprint creation is relatively simple and allows converting the complex interconnections of relationships into an approachable and accessible for, which is especially useful for the managers working in the public administration field. Therefore, it should be considered valuable as a tool for operations management.
Reference List
Sampson, S E 2012, ‘Visualizing service operations’, Journal of Service Research, vol. 15, no 2, pp. 182‐198.