ARE TQM PRINCIPLES IMPLEMENTED BY LARGE COMPANIES AND SMES SIMILAR IN TURKEY

Abstract

ISO 9001: 2000 Quality Management Systems (QMS): Requirement standards are based on Total Quality Management (TQM) approach. Moreover large companies can easily adopt to ISO 9001: 2000 certification due to their quality improvement efforts, Small and Middle Scale Enterprises (SMEs) can meet with some difficulties. Due to the fact that ISO 9001: 2000 QMS standard has been certificated since 2000, it is expected that the TQM principles which are customer focus, leadership, employee involvement, process approach, system approach, continuous improvement, decisions based on facts, relationships with supplier's mutual benefits, have been implemented both in large companies and SMEs. The purpose of this paper is to find out the differences of TQM implementation levels between large companies, SMEs and to determine the principles in which SMEs need improvement on TQM in Turkey. Each principles of TQM were investigated with several questions in this questionnaire with 5- Likert scale. The response rate is 11.5%. It is founded that four principles of TQM in Turkey are better managed by large companies than SMEs: leadership, employee involvement, continuous improvement, and decisions based on facts. Also, the results were compared with other countries. In additionally, same questionnaire is applied in 2010 both SMEs and large companies in Turkey and results are compared with 2005.