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Abstract
The paradigm shift in business due to globalization and information technology revolution, has
replaced business units with business networks. This has given rise to issues of integrations and
coordination in these networks or supply chains making it a fertile area to explore for researchers
as well as practitioners. While coordination, integration are hot area in supply chain research,
service quality is also an important area in supply chain owing to its nexus to business
performance. The businessmen, who were once contended with local optimization, have realized
that they have to think of optimization in supply chain perspective now. The ‘me syndrome’ has
to be replaced by ‘we syndrome’ in business to survive and sustain in the long term.
Service quality, a well researched and structured domain in research, claims of various models,
metrics and scale that measures service quality in various settings across diverse industries. But
the various inventories, that the literature offers, addresses service quality at unit/ micro level; the
macro perspective to measure the service quality when more than one firm is involved is
absolutely missing. The service quality literature has to be aligned to supply chain perspective.
Business performance literature offers a bouquet of frameworks and metrics to measure the
performance of firm. While most of them focus on cost metrics, a few of them include non cost
metrics also, and thus, give a balanced assessment of the business performance. But as the case in
other domains of research, this domain also considers micro/ unit level for assessment and focuses
on local optimization of performance. The supply chain perspective is missing again.
Realizing the need for measuring the service quality and business performance from supply chain
perspective, the researcher has taken up the following topic for doctoral study ‘Development of
measure of service quality across supply chain and its impact on overall supply chain
performance’. In order to make the research feasible a section of supply chain is considered with a
supplier, focal firm and distributor. The service quality of the supplier (upstream supply chain)
and the service quality of the distributor (downstream supply chain) is measured by developing a
service quality scale. The scale has been developed on methodology similar to that used by
Parsuraman in developing Servqual. Having developed the scale, the service quality of the
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upstream and downstream partners with respect to the focal firms has been measured for 150
supply chains. The business performance of the focal firm is measured using the balanced score
card developed by Kaplan & Norton. The service quality of the upstream and downstream supply
chain is then aggregated to compute the overall service quality of the supply chain. The business
performance of the focal firm is also aggregated to compute the overall performance of the supply
chain. The aggregates of service quality of supply chain and business performance are then
studied to see how service quality affects the overall supply chain performance. To make the
study more useful the service quality of the upstream and the downstream partners have been
studied across the industry demographics. The performance of the focal firms has also been
studied across the various industry demographics.
The above outlined work is executed and put in the form of this thesis. The thesis consists of six
chapters. The first chapter is on introduction and chalks out the importance of supply chain in
contemporary business. It highlights the nexus of service quality and business performance and
delineates the same in supply chain perspective.
The second chapter presents a comprehensive review of literature that exists, relevant to the topic
of research. The literature review touches upon three different islands, namely- supply chain,
service quality and business performance. The literature has been collected from various journals
and online repositories of the three disciplines to understand the current state of research that is
exist in the three areas.
The third chapter discusses the proposed model and the research methodology. In order to make
the research practically feasible, a simple model of the supply chain is considered for assessing
sendee quality and business performance.. The research objectives and hypothesis are also a part
of this chapter. The model is followed by research methodology that is used to carry out the task
and achieve the objectives of research.
The fourth chapter is on data analysis; it gives an exhaustive presentation of analysis that is done
to extract useful information from the data by means of charts, tables and various statistical tools.
This chapter is divided into various subsections. The first section gives the demographic profile
of the focal firm of the supply chain. The next two sections discuss the scale development for
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upstream and downstream service quality. The next section deals with the performance
measurement of the focal firm. Subsequent section discusses the relationship between upstream
service quality and downstream service quality. The last two sections discuss the service quality
and its relationship with performance of supply chain.
The fifth chapter is on discussion and findings. The result of data analysis is discussed here in the
same sequence as it has been done in the chapter on data analysis. The service quality of upstream
and downstream supply chain has been touched first followed by performance measurement. The
chapter ends with discussion on service quality of supply chain and its impact on overall business
performance of supply chain.
f The last chapter is on conclusion. It puts across the relevance of this research work for managers.
After discussing the implications of the service quality scale that is developed and the
implications of other findings, the chapter ends with limitations and directions for future research.
VIII

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