Abstract
<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> The great promise of continual quality improvement advocated by early quality gurus like Deming and Juran has not been fully realized. This paper explores the reasons for the limited success of implementation and institutionalization of continuous quality improvement.</p><p><strong>Approach:</strong> About 100 quality professionals from diverse organizations answered questions related to this study. Additionally, the authors executed a wide-ranging literature search including the use of Google Scholar.</p><p><strong>Findings:</strong> Nearly all quality professionals queried in this study agree that compliance to an external quality standard such as ISO is mandatory for their organizations. However, there is disagreement as to whether or not compliance with the continuous improvement proviso in most quality standards is actually implemented and functioning.</p><p><strong>Research limitations/implications:</strong> The sample size is small and there is a need for a larger universe of quality professionals, registration/standards organizations, and academic researchers.</p><p><strong>Practical implications:</strong> Many organizations from a broad array of economic sectors both public and private must comply with external quality standards. Most external quality standards contain a requirement for evidence of continuous improvement. However, the potential for improvement associated with compliance is frequently not realized.</p><p><strong>Originality/value:</strong> Continuous quality improvement is central to many quality standards including ISO 9001. Unfortunately, many ISO compliant organizations are unable to operationalize and sustain the process of continual improvement. This paper provides a novel examination of this problem and suggests ways that organizations can leverage the potential for improvement via their existing quality systems.</p>
Highlights
Since the prehistoric beginnings of human material culture, craft production has exhibited bona fide processes of quality control
This paper provides a novel examination of this problem and suggests ways that organizations can leverage the potential for improvement via their existing quality systems
By limiting the import of Japanese autos and protecting domestic producers, the American Voluntary Restraint Act (VRA) tacitly acknowledged the superiority of Japanese manufacturing methods and ushered in the modern US era of “improvement” not just of product quality, but of all industrial and business processes
Summary
Since the prehistoric beginnings of human material culture, craft production has exhibited bona fide processes of quality control. By limiting the import of Japanese autos and protecting domestic producers, the American VRA tacitly acknowledged the superiority of Japanese manufacturing methods and ushered in the modern US era of “improvement” not just of product quality, but of all industrial and business processes This era was heralded with the famous broadcast of “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We” by Dr W. Poksinska, Dahlgaard and Antoni (2002) cited by Sampaio, Saraiva and Guimarães Rodrigues (2009) concluded that companies “...maximize their benefits if they achieve ISO 9001 certification based on internal motivations.” These “internal” motivations for ISO registration are those associated with continuously improving productivity, quality, customer satisfaction etc. It is common that when a large and geographically dispersed company is compliant to an external standard, many employees are not even aware of the quality standard and its requirements (Teehan and Tucker, 2014)
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