Consumers are quite aware of the quality of the products. To zoom in further, quality is an essential factor for business growth, profitability and a vital element for competitive advantage. Consumer select the product which is better in quality as compared to other products available in the market. Effective quality improvement brings increase profitability for those firms which use quality as their business strategy. Through the effective quality improvement one could easily gain market penetration with in no time.
These characteristics enhance the importance of certain marketing strategies that are unique to services marketing, such as service customization, managing evidence, making the service tangible, and synchronizing supply and demand patterns. Quality is an extremely difficult concept to be defined in few words. Quality has been defined as conforming to requirements .This implies that organizations must establish requirements and specifications; once the requirements and specifications established, the quality goal of the various function of an organization is to comply strictly with these
[1], quality is defined as fitness for use and one of the approaches that identify the definition are value-based approaches of operation management. The objective of a firm, therefore, is to focus on satisfying the customer with improved profits as the reward. In
The meaning of quality in terms of business and services has changed significantly. There are different definition of quality, however, each of the organisation interpret it as per their needs and requirement. According to Peter Drucker, quality in terms of products and service is not what is put in by the supplier but it is what is given to the customer or what the customer is willing to pay for the quality. While on the other hand, the American Society for Quality defined it as the subjective term for each of the individual because everyone has his or her own definition of quality. However, in technical terms quality is considered as the characteristics of the product or service through which ability to satisfy the need is achieved.
The importance of service quality arises from the essential need to create customer satisfaction. It is like a chain that used to connect customer expectations and perceptions in order to achieve customer satisfaction. Service quality can simply described as the difference between customer expectation of the service they will use and customer perception of the service has been provided (Oliver 1997). The higher the conformance of degree, the excellent the service quality will be and vice versa. Accordingly, the core value to achieve good service quality is customer satisfaction (Oliver 1997) or maybe the customer will be more pleasured and become loyal customer (Gibson 2005) and that means that they are also likely to spread positive word of mouth.
Role of operation manager Operation manager contributes an important role in a business or any other organization, which may be either government or private. The task of an operation manager depends on the nature and size of an enterprise i.e. what kind of business that particular organization is running. Operation managers should have the skills to co-operate with the other managers of that particular organization and should have the required skills in order to deal with the lower and the upper staff of a company. Operation manager is an vital individual which makes sure that an organization is running without any deficit.
Due to intangible nature of services, quality plays a pivotal role for the success of service industry. There has been continued research on the definition and measurement of service quality concept. Batagan et al. (2009) defined quality as the degree in which the object satisfies user’s requirement. It refers to how a service is delivered to the end user.
The study goes on to highlight that relationship, service quality, value and strong reputation are most important to clients, largely due to intangibility and people-intensive nature of services provided. It also suggests that services require a high level of client trust and credibility (e.g. large engineering consulting projects, financial risk, and other advice) and thus demanding services which have to develop a strong brand that helps reduce the client risk. A study done by (Jalkala & Keranen, 2014) on brand positioning for companies providing customer solutions identified four strategies: customer value diagnostic, global solution integrator, high-quality sub-systems provider, and long-term service partner. These strategies indeed help organization position their services in more end-to-end methodology and supporting the whole life-cycle of services.
Cronin and Taylor (1992); Oliver (1981); Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1988) stress that customer satisfaction and service quality as two different concepts which looks similar in meaning. On the other hand, observed service quality was defined as a mode of behaviour and long term decision of a product or service. Therefore, questionable point of the observation is the connection in between customer satisfaction and service quality. There is a common form of accession by the investigators that the approach of customer satisfaction and service quality are greatly interconnected. Yet, customer satisfaction is allowed as a particular act on a certain decision.
From this definition it appears, that management operation involves the activities that transform resources into usable goods and services which generate value for the organization and it also linked with the business strategy. In the context of operation management, the functions of managers and the role of leaders outline the organization acts on the chosen path towards the execution of