Purpose: The general objective of this research was to identify the practices of the mass production industries, on the decisions related to the detection of defective products and to identify relevant criteria, actions, effects and variables to be used in a decision-making model....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a new methodology to be used by small and medium enterprises to characterize their performance in quality, highlighting weaknesses and areas for improvement. The methodology aims to identify the main causes of quality problems and help to...

Purpose: System reliability optimisation in today’s world is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction, businesses competitiveness, secure and uninterrupted delivery of services and safety of operations. Among many systems configurations, complex systems are the most difficult to model for...

TQM is a philosophy mainly dominated by large companies. Small businesses are lagging behind larger ones when it comes to introducing and adopting new managerial philosophies and advanced technology. Many small companies have stopped at quality system certification, such as ISO 9000, in their...

The proposed framework for TQM implementation in SMEs described in this paper centres on three main elements: the “quality toolbox”, “general methodology” and the “central co‐ordinating body”. It is believed that the adoption of TQM in SMEs must not be a fully blown approach but a...

Most of the literature on knowledge management (KM) and its application has, until recently, been centered on large organizations. Pertinent issues in small businesses have to a large extent been neglected. However, small businesses do not necessarily share the same characteristics and ideals as...