The Impact of Quality Management Tools on Performance : An Exploratory Study on SMES

The present work is an empirical study on the impact of quality management techniques, such as Just-In-Time (JIT), 5S’s tools, suggestion schemes, workers participation, Quality Circles (QC) and ISO certification, on the performance of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The performance parameters considered in the study are human resource, inventory management, quality aspects and cost aspects. On the basis of preliminary survey and literature review, a comprehensive questionnaire was developed and circulated to different firms and the responses were collected for analyzing the data. The correlation was obtained between the quality/productivity management systems and the output parameters of firms. The impact of these on the output parameters was validated on the basis of correlation values