The QS 9000 quality system was developed in the United States in 1994 by a team consisting of representatives of General Motors, Ford, and Daimler‐Chrysler as well as the US truck manufacturers. The objective of the system is to standardize the quality system requirements and documentation...

Purpose – Business process change (BPC) is an organizational initiative to achieve significant improvement in performance and has been extensively reported in the information systems literature. Total quality management (TQM) has been employed to improve the quality of processes within a...

Offers an integrative perspective of quality function deployment (QFD), including its benefits and shortcomings. By developing a model that includes within it the antecedents as well as the components of QFD and the potential gains accruing to an organization from QFD, clarifies this competitive...

Demonstrates how the Career Services Department of Grand Valley State University was able to implement simple quality principles and tools for improving its Employment Bulletin process. Discusses the overall goal which was to reduce costs and to improve the efficiency of the overall process, and...

By means of a case study, illustrates how a Midwest service organization in the USA was able to improve the efficiency and productivity of its support staff. Suggests that the process can be used by other service organizations wanting to improve the efficiency and productivity of their support...

Process capability studies are of great use to the quality practitioner, but quite often, processes with excellent capability indices have a high percentage of nonconformance. One of the major reasons for this is that the studies do not take the variation in the raw materials into account. For...

The aim of this study is to identify and interpret the critical factors and performance measures of TQM. Based on extensive review of prescriptive, conceptual, practitioner, and empirical literature; we were able to identify seven critical factors and more than 45 performance measures of TQM. A...