Service blueprinting and BPMN: a comparison

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast a customer‐focused service process diagram tool (blueprinting) with an organizational‐focused process diagram tool (business process modeling notation, or BPMN).Design/methodology/approach – Using a hotel stay as an example, the paper presents both a service blueprint and a BPMN diagram. The authors then explicitly discuss the similarities, differences resulting from an ontological comparison of service blueprints and BPMN, and show where the two tools can be complementary.Findings – The authors have found that one similarity is that service blueprinting segments processes into parts that are similar to BPMN's idea of swimlanes. However, the swimlanes in service blueprinting separate customer actions, customer‐facing employees’ actions and functions, and back‐stage functions, actors, and information systems, thereby effectively mandating certain swimlanes for the purpose of analyzing points of contact between the firm and a customer. Another s...