THE INFLUENCE OF APPLYING THE TQM PRINCIPLE ON THE BUSINESS RESULTS OF BIG CROATIAN COMPANIES

Companies in the modern environment which constantly changes competitiveness, have to devote significant time and resources, financial and human, as well as the energy to measure their own performance in achieving the preset strategic goals. Although the methods of managing business have significantly changed over the past few decades, the approaches to measuring and handling results of business activities have remained unadapted to new circumstances. However, it is not enough only to introduce new theoretical knowledge form the field of organisation and management but it is also necessary to find a way how to measure the introduced changes. Nowadays, the feedback is the key to success, because it gives the concrete information about the success of introducing news into a company as well as the information about performances of a company on the whole. That is why today great attention is given to the methodologies which try to evaluate the performance of a company. The results of the conducted research show that companies with a low level of performance in the research from the year 2000 went bankrupt or shut down during the following two four-year-cycles (2001-2008). The results of the empirical research have shown a significant correlation between the performances investigated in 2000 and the financial results in the period until 2008.