3. RESEARCH GOALS
This paper aims at combining the uses of service blueprint and failure analysis in a
service company to prevent the critical failures from occurring and reduce the risk of service
failures. The proposed failure-free service design model is shown in Figure 1. In the model, a
service blueprint needs to be developed, first, to identify the potential fail points and failure
modes for both the front office and the back office activities. Based on the blueprint, the
FMEA tool was applied to prioritize the critical potential failure modes.
To demonstrate the proposed approach, an example regarding to the hypermarket store
was used. The required data regarding to the severity degree, the occurrence probability, and
the detection ability are achieved from a questionnaire survey on the employees and managers
of a chain hypermarket store with four branches in Taiwan. Then, a service failure criticality
analysis is performed according to the Risk Priority Number (RPN) of each potential failure
modes. The RPN’s are used to determine the risk of potential failures and prioritize the
needed preventive actions and the resource allocations before the service is delivered. This
would ensure the service quality before the service is delivered.