Question

1) How important is inventory to the operation of a supply chain? Are all types of inventory managed in the same way?

2) Why is measuring service quality so difficult?

Please answer both the questions shortly but to the main points.

Answer 1

1) How important is inventory to the operation of a supply chain? Are all types of inventory managed in the same way?

Inventory plays a very important role in the smooth functioning of supply chain. All the materials that are required for production and other activities of supply chain are stored in the inventory . Inventory must be maintained by experts so that any material can be refilled before it gets completely finished and hence supply chain will not be interrupted. Inventory is managed depending on it's size. Some are maintained daily while some are maintained once in a while. Some organisations have very small inventories and hence managed daily. Some organisations have wide inventories and have sepreate department to manage them,

2) Why is measuring service quality so difficult?

Service quality is difficult to measure because the outputs of many services are intangible or subject to individual judgments. Ultimately, the measure of service quality is a measure of customer satisfaction. But, customer satisfaction is a measure of the discrepancy between the customer's expectations before the service is delivered and his or her perceptions of the service that is delivered, which are both subjective evaluations.A measurement tool called SERVQUAL attempts to deal with this difficulty by tracking service quality trends by measuring the gaps between customer expectations and perceptions. Surrogate measures such as customer waiting times and the number of customer complaints may also be used to assess customer satisfaction and service quality.

In addition to the difficulties in measuring the quality of outputs, service organizations face another importantproblem related to quality. Because services usually are provided and consumed simultaneously, there seldom isenough time to remedy an incidence of poor service before the customer is involved in the process.