Distributor–Retailer Interface in Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: A Service Quality Measurement Scale

In the current competitive market, ‘service quality’ management is the key to survival and success of businesses. There exists a variety of definitions of the term ‘service quality’ in the literature and referring to the existing definitions, a variety of scales have been developed for measuring service quality. Amongst the others, ‘SERVQUAL’ is the popular service quality measurement scales (SQMS) that has served as a basis for subsequent research on service quality and has been used for testing different issue related to service quality and using it in the market. This research is aimed at developing service quality scale at the distributors-retailers interface of the pharmaceutical supply chains (PSC) in Iran. It also discusses developing SQMS in a previously ignored sector namely distributors-retailers interface of PSC. Therefore, in order to measuring the satisfaction level of the pharmacies from the services of a medicine distributor in Iran, authors developed a reliable and valid measurement scale consisting of 5 dimension (Reliability, Tangibility, Assurances, Empathy and Responsiveness) with 20 items that can be used effectively to achieving competitive advantage in the distributor-retailor interface.