A study of total quality management and supply chain management practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a set of total quality management (TQM) and supply chain management (SCM) practices through an extensive literature review and to identify the relationships among them by comparing the identified TQM and SCM practices. Design/methodology/approach – An extensive overview of the practices of TQM and SCM is carried out using published research papers and some major TQM and SCM practices were extracted. These identified practices are then compared to explore the relationship between them for better understanding and application. Findings – The results reveal six major TQM and SCM practices from as many as 50 TQM practices and 40 SCM practices. The paper further compares these practices and found that management support and commitment, customer focus, and supplier partnership are the most common practices found in both TQM and SCM literature, and have the strongest impact in the integration of TQM and SCM across organizations. Research limitations/implications – This paper focuses only on the literature review of previously published studies, further empirical study can be undertaken using these six identified practices which may allow the validation and generalization of results. Practical implications – The result of this paper will help in providing greater understanding of identified TQM and SCM practices that will lead to successful implementation of TQM and SCM strategies to improve customer service levels and, hence, business performance. Originality/value – Much of the literature on TQM practices and SCM practices are available, but as far as the authors know there is no study undertaken to integrate TQM and SCM practices. This is the first kind of study that compares TQM and SCM practices taken together and can be thus, treated as filling a gap in the extant literature.