A Comparison of Concepts in Service Blueprinting and Process Chain Network (PCN)

Service blueprinting has been used for over 30 years as a service process visualization technique. A new service process visualization technique called Process-Chain-Network (PCN) has been recently introduced and is claimed to be an improvement on previous visualization methods. We use the method of conceptual evaluation to compare and explore the similarities and differences between the concepts in service blueprinting and the concepts in PCN. Specifically, we aim to answer two research questions: 1) how well do PCN concepts support service blueprinting concepts? and 2) how well do service blueprinting concepts support PCN concepts? The results of this study show that these modeling formalisms have different views towards the categorization of service activities. We conclude that whilst service blueprinting depicts business roles and their interactions with a customer, PCN focuses on the nature of interaction between customer and service provider. Moreover, we find that PCN is a better method for process re-engineering in comparison with service blueprinting, both modelings supporting customer experience to some degree.

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