Exploring Internal Service Quality in a Manufacturing Organization – A Study in Lucus TVS, Chennai

In recent years there has been a paradigm shift in the interpersonal relationship within manufacturing organizations. With TQM practices in place, service function play a key role in enhancing its offering to production function as well as business enterprise on the whole. The concept of customer is redefined internally relating ‘Next Process as your customer’. This leads to understanding the requirements of internal customers and satisfying their needs. The end result focuses on getting them better served in the linkage of supply chain. This study is built on such research and is focused on the quality of internal services provided by ‘Internal Suppliers to ‘Internal customers’. To obtain a diverse population sample, quantitative data was collected from Lucas TVS Chennai. A total of 550 questionnaires were personally administered, out of which 500 were obtained as complete for usage. At the screening stages, 22 questionnaires had to be rejected due to inconsistent and incongruous response. Thus, the final sample size in the present study had been that of 478 respondents, providing an 87 per cent response rate, which is considered to be reasonably satisfactory. In condition to this, Correlation analysis was interpreted through checking the direction and magnitude of each two related variable in terms of the r value. The hierarchical regression helped us to further understand the relationship among variables. Selected demographic variables were entered in the second block of the regression model. Data interpretation was made based on the results of ANOVA, Factor analysis, Regression and correlation analysis. During the whole analysis process objectivity was maintained. This study has implications for human resource managers and it further advances the knowledge base of internal service quality in the field of manufacturing organization.