OCTOBER 19-20, 2012 - YMCA University of Science & Technology

Proceedings of the National Conference on
Trends and Advances in Mechanical Engineering,
YMCA University of Science & Technology, Faridabad, Haryana, Oct 19-20, 2012
Customer service quality
In the supply chain everyone in the downstream is the customer of upstream. Haywood – Farmer (1988)
discussed that customer is the ultimate judge and he judges the quality by comparing expectations and
perceptions of any organization.
The organization of paper is as follows: first is introduction and literature survey which further proceed to
service quality in supply chain. Then service quality for different elements of supply chain will be discussed.
After that model development and discussion will be their followed by conclusion.
Framework
It is evident from the literature that much work on service quality is in the area of services and models, but the
applicability of service quality concepts in supply chain management as a whole seems to be inadequate. Thus
there seems to be a gap in the modeling and measurement in supply chain management. This has motivated to
propose the model described in the next section.
Model development & Discussion
For measurement of service quality in supply chain in manufacturing industries a model is proposed along with
the detail of different types of gaps in forward and backward direction. This conceptual model is based on the
gap model used by different researchers ((Leminen, 2001; Guo, 2002; Seth et al, 2006) for different purposes. The
gaps shown in the proposed model are divided in to two categories:
Forward Gap: This gap is in the direction of material flow i.e. from supplier to organization, from organization
to distributor, from distributor to retailer and from retailer to customer.
Reverse Gap: This gap is in the direction of feed back or in the opposite of direction of material flow i.e. from
customer to retailer, from retailer to distributor, from distributor to organization and from organization to
supplier.
The proposed model i.e. fig -2 attempts to analyze the various service quality gaps in the supply chain. The
different types of bidirectional gap are:
1) Inter-organizational (between supplier and industry);
2) Intra-organizational (between industry and distributor);
3) Intra-organizational (between distributor and retailer); and
4) Inter-organizational (between retailer and customer).
The detail of these gaps is discussed in table 1. This model also indicates that if customer has any problem with
service or if customer is not satisfied it affect the whole supply chain.
It is visualized that a typical supply chain is always influenced by a variety of external environmental factors
which may play an important role in global economy (Seth et al, 2006). The implications of these factors on
supply chain are as follows:
Competitions: an industry may have a number of suppliers. There may be a competition for Technology, Lead
time, Market Share, Price, quality of service etc. for facing this tough competition the supply chain must be
review and re-oriented though Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean products affect many customer in Indian market.
Political Environment: Tax policies, Expansion policy, Resource allotment policy etc are the political affairs
which affect the supply chain. Many times government gives the relaxation in taxes etc. for development of a
particular region. It affect the plant location, warehouse, transportation cost etc.
Technical: Better feature and performance at fewer prices attract the customer and increase the market share.
Those who are having less market share offer fewer price in same segment. In case of cars, for a particular
segment, who gives more features and service at less price attract the customer more and enjoy the largest share
of market.
Price Fluctuation: Many times price fluctuation of the product force the customer to find some alternate. The
price fluctuation may be due to Fuel price variation in Global market, USD rate variation, Availability of SPMs,
Raw Material, Machining Price, Derivative etc.
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