Analytic Network Process Analysis of an Indian Telecommunication Service Supply Chain: A Case Study

The major intent of this research is to analyze the performance quality dimensions of a telecom service company Supply Chain in the Indian context. Currently a rapid boom has been experienced in telecom sectors. While dealing with more and more sophisticated technologies and better change management schemes, one of the crucial problems faced by the top management is the comparative evaluation of various alternatives in the telecom service supply. ANP is a powerful multi-criteria decision-making tool to encapsulate the interdependencies among and between levels of decision attributes. It structures the decision problem in a hierarchical form and links the determinants, dimensions, and enablers with alternatives available to the decision maker. Therefore, in the current study undertaken in a public sector unit in India, the dimensions of telecom service sector have been captured in four perspectives viz. customer, internal business, innovation and learning, and finance, which mimic a balanced score card. Three services of the public sector telecom organization that have been analyzed are (i) Consultancy (ii) Project Execution (iii) Training and quality control. Here the determinants, dimensions and enablers have been derived based on the combination of literature review and insights gained through exploratory interviews with the appropriate experts/ professionals. It was observed that criteria, sub-criteria, determinants, etc. were interrelated. The comparative evaluation between alternatives was done based on the feedback of ten relevant executives. Geometric mean of their response was considered as the combined evaluation score. Later super matrices were formed. Further, a quantified value named as overall weighted service index, which would give an indication of the performance of an organization and provide directions to managers where the improvement efforts has been derived. This was highest for consultancy and lowest for training and quality control. The article concludes with managerial implication and scope for future work. [<i>Service Science</i>, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]