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SCECO‐EAST introduced total quality management (TQM) to achieve three main goals: increase customer satisfaction; reduce cycle time of the processes; and minimize total cost. Applying a TQM programme in service companies is very different from manufacturing in organizations since it involves subjective measures, while in manufacturing companies the end product is tangible and can easily be measured against preset standards. Explains in detail how TQM concepts can be applied to the process of “maintenance of medium voltage substations”. First, the team was formed to break down the process and assign actual time involved in each activity which helps to calculate the existing cycle time of the process. Second, value added and non‐value added activities were identified in order to eliminate/improve non‐necessary non‐value added activities. Third, the relationship value between customer needs and the work process was found by multiplying improvement ratio by the associated relationship weight to let the team focus on process activities which have the highest rating and biggest impact on customer satisfaction. Finally, the proposed recommendations/ improvements were evaluated and analysed. Concludes that applying TQM in a maintenance of S/S will reduce cycle time by 40 per cent which also results in a reduction of materials and manpower that correspond to more than one million Saudi Riyals per year.

Quality problems in the service organization are the result of the mismatch between prior expectation and perceived quality of the service. Each organization will attempt to determine the requirements of its customers and translate these requirements into product and delivery process specifications. This paper examines a particular electric company (SCECO‐East), a typical service provider in Saudi Arabia, in which service quality is a distinguishing feature of primary importance. It describes a detailed survey and analysis in the light of the model put forward by Parasuraman et al. It utilizes SERVQUAL for measuring customers’ perceptions of service quality. The study revealed that SCECO‐East scored high in tangibles dimension but low in features of responsiveness and reliability. In addition, while the performance of SCECO‐East was acceptable to all customer categories, service quality was perceived differently by various types of customers, with reinforcement and commercial customers awarding SCECO‐East even lower ratings than other customers did.