Design and blueprinting for total quality management implementation in service organisations

Abstract

In service companies, the implementation of total quality management (TQM) is hindered by several barriers. Nevertheless, this study shows that it is possible to overcome these barriers by means of a technique for graphically designing or representing service processes, namely service blueprinting (SB). Particularly, a user-friendly methodological approach, which employs SB, is designed for implementing TQM in service organisations. Finally, an action research is performed for testing the effectiveness of the proposed methodological approach.

Keywords:

• service blueprinting
• TQM
• TQM implementation
• business excellence
• service quality