The effectiveness analysis of the practices in five quality management stages for SMEs

Abstract

For most countries around the world, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economic development, but they are usually embedded with weak competition as opposed to big enterprises. The pursuit of quality is often adopted by SMEs as the main strategy to raise their competitive advantage. In order to reveal the SMEs’ implementation status of quality practices, and also to find out where to be improved, we first develop a ‘systematic framework of quality management with five stages’ for SMEs, and then conduct the related empirical study to investigate the implementation status of the practices in these five stages for SMEs. We also analyse the implementation performance of the practices by using a developed implementation-effectiveness analysis model. SMEs usually implement more practices belonging to the lower stages, but the adoption of total quality management (TQM) is an exception, since the governments in Taiwan provide financial motivation to support SMEs to implement the quality practices of TQM. Based on the analytical results of the implementation-effectiveness analysis model, SMEs need to raise the implementation levels on the critical practices which will result in significant effectiveness degree, for examples, lean production, process capability control, customer relationship management, and performance management.