According to the literature, quality management consists of a set of components: critical factors, tools, techniques and practices. The purpose of this paper is: to identify the components of total quality management (TQM), in order to make them known to managers and thus facilitate successful quality management implementation, and to show the situation of 106 ISO 9000 certified firms concernin…
ISO 9000 standards for quality system management are involving a higher and higher number of enterprises and organizations. This paper presents a detailed analysis of certification diffusion in Italy and in some European countries with similar economic structures. Benchmarking and evolution forecasts are based on the “logistic model”, traditionally used for studying biological growth phenom…
Many people believe that good documentation systems are vital for quality performance of a company. However, if the system is not optimized or it does not take the specific industry into consideration, inefficiency may result. Therefore, in the process of implementing the ISO 9000 standards, careful matching between the standard requirements with the practical characteristic of the industry i…
ISO 9000 and Activity‐Based Costing (ABC) are two useful tools for logisticians. Both of these tools can support efforts to improve customer service and/or reduce total costs. Using survey and case study methods, we investigate whether these two techniques are implemented together as complements, are kept separate, or are considered competitors for scarce resources (money, time and talent). T…
For most software companies, the pressure for process improvement arises from the direction of a recently released standard in the domain of process assessment and determination of capability (ISO 15504). In the case of ISO 9001 a valuable framework for evaluation of the degree of compliance to this standard is provided by SABS ARP 042: 1997, while ISO 15504 Part 5 offers a detailed assessmen…
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the world-wide diffusion, according to industrial sectors of activity, of the ISO 9000 family of quality standards.
The value of ISO 9000 and TQM are revisited, including the relationship with logistics strategy and the four pillars of TQM. The Japanese TQM experience is put under close scrutiny, which leads to the need for TQM model. A model called TQMEX standing for a TQM EXcellence Model has been developed based on sound TQM practices. Further to a previous survey conducted on 180 UK firms, another questi…