MGMT 8815M Week 7 Service Blueprint Memo Example

Memorandum

To: Vice President of Operations, Larchmont Residential Management

From: Service Design Lead

Date: January 27, 2026

Re: Blueprint of the no-heat repair process and where it stalls

Why a Blueprint

Larchmont Residential Management, a composite firm managing about 2,400 apartments in 31 buildings around Columbus, Ohio, promises tenants that a no-heat call in winter will be resolved within 24 hours. Last December, the median no-heat repair took 61 hours from first call to working heat. Each office involved reports that its own part is fast, so the delay had to be found between the offices, which is what a blueprint is designed to show.

The Blueprint

Shostack (1982) proposed mapping a service as a sequence of steps divided by a line of visibility, so that what the customer experiences sits above the line and the work that supports it sits below. Bitner et al. (2008) later set out the conventions most service teams now use: customer actions at the top, then frontstage contact, the line of visibility, backstage actions and support processes. Table 1 follows those conventions for one typical repair, reconstructed from 22 December work orders, the dispatch log and interviews with one person in each role.

Table 1

Service Blueprint of a No-Heat Repair (Median December Case)

Hours are measured from the first call. A tilde marks a cell where the lane does not apply at that step. Interviews were held with the dispatcher, one contractor, one property manager and one accounts payable clerk.

Walking the Figure Left to Right

Four handoffs connect five people who never meet. The first, from the answering service to the dispatcher, crosses by email and takes under an hour; the ticket carries the unit number, the tenant's phone number and a free-text note. The second, from dispatcher to contractor, crosses by phone and is usually complete within two hours. Neither handoff explains the delay.

The third handoff carries the quote from the contractor to the property manager. It crosses by email, outside the work-order system, so the ticket shows no change while the quote waits. The fourth carries the approved quote back to the contractor and, separately, sends the job to accounts payable.

Where Requests Stall

The stall is at the third handoff. In the median December case, the quote reached the property manager about six hours after the first call and was approved about 44 hours later. The property manager explained why. Larchmont's policy requires any quote above $500 to be checked against the contractor's open invoices, so that the firm does not approve new work for a contractor with disputed bills. That check is done by asking accounts payable, by email, whether the contractor's previous invoices have been reconciled. The accounts payable clerk processes these requests in a weekly batch on Thursdays and, in the busy weeks of winter, by priority of invoice age rather than by the urgency of the repair the question relates to.

The rule makes sense on its own terms, and nobody in the process is slow. The delay is produced by joining a weekly financial routine to a 24-hour repair promise, and it is invisible to the tenant, who sees only that nothing happens after the contractor leaves. Repeat calls from tenants, logged at step 4, added nine minutes of answering service time per repair but no information anyone used.

Link to the Working Frame

The working frame for this project holds that tenants wait for heat because decisions are made by people who cannot see the unit or the tenant. The blueprint sharpens that frame. The deciding person here is not the property manager, who would approve most heating quotes immediately, but the accounts payable clerk, who has no way of knowing that a particular question delays a family's heat. Patrício et al. (2011) proposed designing services on three linked levels, from the firm's place among the providers a customer uses down to the single encounter; this case shows a system-level rule overriding an encounter-level promise.

What the Blueprint Suggests Testing

Two changes follow directly from the figure. A quote for a no-heat repair could carry a flag in the work-order system that moves the accounts payable check to the same day, or the policy could set a higher threshold for emergency heating repairs, perhaps $1,200, below which the property manager approves without the check. Either change should be tested for one month in a subset of buildings, with time to approval and any later disputed invoices recorded, before it becomes policy.

References

Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service blueprinting: A practical technique for service innovation. California Management Review, 50(3), 66-94. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166446

Patrício, L., Fisk, R. P., Falcão e Cunha, J., & Constantine, L. (2011). Multilevel service design: From customer value constellation to service experience blueprinting. Journal of Service Research, 14(2), 180-200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670511401901

Shostack, G. L. (1982). How to design a service. European Journal of Marketing, 16(1), 49-63. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000004799