A quantifiable quality enabled servitisation model: benchmarking Indian automobile manufacturers

In spite of increasing importance of servitisation for the success of automobile organisations, the factors that influence it are not well researched. In this paper, we discuss the important issue of computing service quality of an automobile organisation and put forward a graph theory-based methodology to evaluate the factors affecting the quality in the servitisation practices to propose a critical service quality index (CSQI) to measure the same. The application of the proposed methodology is demonstrated in three Indian automobile organisations. This ensures the validation of the proposed approach and also helps to evolve select key recommendations for improving servitisation quality in the Indian automobile organisation. This research advances the present body of knowledge by making three-fold contributions. First, it delivers an organised methodology for quantification of services on adoption of servitisation in an automobile manufacturer and integrates the results obtained in the form of a critical service quality index. The proposed methodology is equally beneficial for assessment and classification of a set of manufacturers. Second, it demonstrates an application of methodology for three Indian automobile organisations to develop select key recommendations which can be seen as a first attempt in the field of servitisation in the Indian context. Finally, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for addressing servitisation challenges and extends key recommendations for improving competitiveness of an automotive organisation through servitisation.