Quality of customer service in supply chain system: a diagnostic study

Supply chain systems play very significant roles to improve the quality of customer service and therefore, derive considerable attention from managers of enterprises in pursuit of competitive excellence. Different strategies are used to improve customer service and different measures are also used to quantify this. A detailed diagnostic study was conducted in a large Indian company dealing with fast moving consumer goods. In this study, a new measure called Depot Service India (DSI) was used to measure the quality of customer service and using which various statistical analyses were carried out to study how the DSI values vary over time and among various depots, how these values are auto‐correlated, what factors influence the variations in DSI values and how various decisions at strategic, tactical and operational levels affect the performance of the system. The details of how the results obtained were used to evolve remedial measures to improve the quality of customer service in the supply chain system of this company are also discussed in this paper.