Total quality management: a state-of-the-art survey of European ‘industry’?

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper reports the main findings of a survey of 358 organizations, mainly from the UK and the Netherlands which focused on the TQM training and research needs of business. It was found that ‘satisfying external customers’ is what TQM means to a majority of organizations and that the main difficulty faced in getting commitment to TQM is changing behaviour and attitudes. In addition the commitment to TQM by senior executives, whilst not perceived as a problem, could be improved upon, and one-third of the organizations in the sample had not prepared a plan for TQM. Also the vast number of organizations apparently do not recognize the long-term nature of TQM, and it is pointed out that service organizations appear equally knowledgeable about TQM as their manufacturing counterparts.

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: