Quality audit, as a methodology for evaluating system, product and/or process performance against established requirements, has experienced substantial growth in worldwide use in recent years. This is largely due to the steady increase in ISO 9000 registrations, which topped 350,000 in the year...

The aim of this study was to determine whether customer satisfaction can be used as a reliable measure of the performance of the management of a research and development (R&D) department. A study of a research and development department of an Australian manufacturing company was undertaken in...

The meaning of TQM sustainablity.The concept of sustainable development has been touted as a new planningagenda (Beatley and Manning, 1998). As such, it becomes a fundamentalconcept which should be an important aspect of all further policy developments(Loffler, 1998).

Purpose – Continuous improvement has become an important strategy in improving organizational performance. Unfortunately, product development is often excluded in continuous improvement programs due to the special characteristics of product development activities. The overall purpose of this...

For both ISO 9000 and TQM concepts there have been many research programmes and publications. However, the coincidence of these topics and/or the ambiguity about their relationship has emerged in a number of discussions. This paper examines this relationship and provides a framework to assist...

This paper proposes a development methodology that uses the assessment criteria of the national quality award as the basis for creating a self‐assessment tool to measure quality performance in organizations. The Singapore Quality Award (SQA) assessment criteria were used as the framework for...

Pattern recognition applied to control charts centers around the development and assessment of automated algorithms for detecting non‐random or unnatural patterns in observations collected from a production process. The work presented here marks the first examination of enhancements to an...