A Quantitative Approach to Measure Quality-Based Competitiveness of an Organization

The operations strategy literature has identified four primary dimensions on which a firm competes with another. These are: price, quality, flexibility, and delivery dependability. Of these, quality is perhaps the most critical dimension in terms of the influence a competitive dimension exercises on the competitiveness of a firm. In this paper, we propose a quantitative measure--Quality-Competitiveness Index (QCI)--to determine the degree to which a firm's quality practices and policies are instrumental in improving its competitiveness. The QCI can be effectively employed for benchmarking among competing firms. More importantly, however, the process involved in the determination of a QCI is itself an educative one. It brings weaknesses and strengths of a company with respect to its quality practices and policies to the surfaces with pinpoint accuracy and can, therefore, be usefully employed to improve its quality competitiveness in an effective manner