Discusses several issues which are essential in achieving quality management and continuous improvements: standardization, maintenance and improvement: Gemba : and tools for problem solving. Argues that most quality problems can be solved by simply using our common sense, unlike the conventional...

The banking industry in Hong Kong plays a significant role in the international financial arena. Because of increasingly competitive pressure from domestic and overseas banks, Hong Kong banks must improve service quality and care about customer demand. They must tightly control cost and improve...

The patterns of adoption of quality management practices and techniques vary across national boundaries. This article presents the findings of a questionnaire survey into the quality management procedures and tools adopted in three European countries, the UK, Portugal and Finland. A total of 450...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the added value of philosophy in understanding and overcoming resistance to quality control. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes a case in which the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd was applied to give advice on a standardisation...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop an yield-based process capability index (PCI), C py , to overcome the shortcomings of existing PCIs that limit their use and lead to inaccurate measures of quality conformance under a variety of common conditions. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose A thorough analysis of nonlinear relationships between quality management (QM) and organizational outcomes has largely been ignored in the current empirical QM literature, which can have profound theoretical and managerial implications. The existence of nonlinear relationships implies...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to answer the following three questions: what influence has the centrally planned economy and Soviet-style manufacturing had on the evolution and implementation of quality management practices in Bulgaria’s manufacturing sector since the end of the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe differences among public and private, manufacturing and service and SMEs and large organisations regarding the outcome of quality management (QM) practices. Design/methodology/approach This study looks at the scores for different criteria (or...