Business process management to customer process management

1. Introduction

Any process redesign effort should in theory take the customers’ needs as a starting point (Chen, Daugherty & Landry, 2009).Therefore even initiatives that focus on improving internal business processes usually start with a declarative goal of delivering value to customers (Ellram, Tate, & Billington, 2008; Trkman, 2010) and the literature on business process management (BPM) is awash with references to customer orientation. BPM can be considered as the way in which customer requirements get transformed into actual goods and services (Smart et al., 2009). Despite the wide adoption of higher customer satisfaction and improvement of relations with customers as a declarative end-goal in BPM (Neubauer, 2009, Schmiedel,vomBrocke&Recker, 2014), most academic and practitioner effortsthat target the improvement of business process focus on improving intra-organisational processes.

Before embarking on such efforts companies can and do capture the current voice of the customer, i.e.,how satisfied the customers currently are (Flint, Larsson, Gammelgaard, & Mentzer, 2005). Based on this knowledge, companies have to reconsider and re-engineer their business processes for customer satisfaction (Lee, Huang, Barnes, & Kao, 2010). By focusing mainly on customer satisfaction, it is implicitly and often erroneously assumed that companies have good knowledge of how the customers use the company’s products or services in their own processes and how the company’s processes interact with customers’ processes.

The difference between customer satisfaction and the actual use of a product in its processes is even more important for companies that are trying to move from producer to solution-provider by infusing their product offeringswith services (Biege, Lay, & Buschak, 2012; Gebauer, Paiola, & Saccani, 2013; Mahapatra, Das, & Narasimhan, 2012; Young, 2008). Many manufacturing companies have problems dealing with the service aspects of these solutions and their process nature, which is fundamentally different from products (Bitner, Ostrom, & Morgan, 2008; Gebauer, et al., 2013; Matthyssens & Vandenbempt, 2010).

A popular saying is namely that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” (attributed to Theodore Levitt). In fact, the customer might want to hang a picture whereby the hole is only one requirement. In turn, this activity could be part of many different customer processes (e.g. building a house or decorating a room). These processes need to be properly understood in order for a company to be able to optimally serve them. Building on Gönroos’ (2011) statement that a supplier’s focus in business relationships should be to engage with their customers' business processes, we argue that a company should even go one step further and not only focus on its own internal and customer-facing processes, but also identify and analyse the customer processes. The supplier may then also encourage the customer to adapt its internal processes to the supplier’s existing solutions when appropriate (Matthyssens & Vandenbempt, 2010).

In this paper, we aim to alleviate these identified gaps in the literature byproviding guidance to organisations on how to systematically and actively engage with their customers’ processes (Grönroos 2011). Based on a case study of a multinational company, we present an approach that combines classical Business Process Management with Service Blueprinting. We illustrate how this combinationallows the customer processes to be analysed and the company’s bundle of products and services to be integrated into these customer processes. This way, both the technical and functional component of customer-perceived quality can actively be optimised (Grönroos, 1997) and the classical dichotomy that separates products and services can be practically bridged to create sustainable relationships between solution providers and customers(Gummesson, 1997).

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: in the next section we introduce the concept of servitization and summarise the relevant literature on BPM. Next, we explain the method of Service Blueprinting andpresent a case study of a company that introduced an extended form of blueprinting. Finally, the case and the new approach are discussed in light of the literature and a number of recommendations are formulated.

2. Literature and theoretical background

2.1. Servitization and dealing with services

Service infusion or servitization (servitization will be used in the remainder of the paper) can be defined as “the process of creating value by adding services to products” (Baines, Lightfoot, & Benedettini, 2009). These integrated combinations of product and service aspects, often referred to as solutions, are more difficult to imitate by competition (Baines, Lightfoot, Peppard et al., 2009) and provide new grounds for differentiation. While the term servitization as such is over 20 years old (originating from (Vandermerwe & Rada, 1988)) it has recently spread to different researcher communities such as service marketing, operations management, engineering, service science management (Lightfoot et al., 2013) and even human resource management (Raja et al., 2010).

One of the many hurdles they are facing is that services are fundamentally different from products (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2008). The first difference is their intangibility: services are processes, not goods. This makes them difficult to grasp, explain and measure, manifesting their value only through the eyes of the customer. Further, services rely on the interactions between the provider and the customer. In fact, services are co-created by the customer and the service provider. Therefore, the behaviour of the customer can have an important impact on the service itself (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2008). Suppliers still often see their solution as a customised and integrated combination of goods and services while customers view it as a set of customer- supplier relational processes (Tuli,Kohli, & Bharadwaj, 2007)