Measurement of service quality of upstream and downstream supply chain

One of the paradigm shifts in business today is that competition between firms is being replaced by competition between supply chains. Customers have started taking service quality as prerequisite criteria in buying decisions. Delivering good service quality to the end customer depends upon the service quality being delivered by every entity involved in supply chain. This paper proposes a model to measure the service quality of supply chain with respect to the focal firm. The service quality delivered by the firms ahead of the focal firm is termed as upstream service quality and the service quality delivered by the firms following the focal firm is termed as downstream service quality. The uniqueness of this paper is that it measures the service quality of the immediate upstream and downstream supply chain partner from focal firms perspective using the same set of constructs and reduces them into factors affecting upstream and downstream service quality.