Understanding Total Quality Management in context: International and Indian Service Industry (A literature review)

Abstract

With the accelerated pace of change the organizations are striving towards delivering product and services better then their known competitor. This is essential for their survival and sustainability. In this era of rapid changes, acquisitions and mergers, fast product changes, increasing customer demands, global pressures, information technology, the organizations need to continuously measure and monitor the quality delivered to the end customer. The ever changing demands of customers further makes the organizations working as a complex job. While, the future trends in the manufacturing can be predicted, but for the services it becomes difficult to predict on account of factors like perishability, heterogeneity, and intangibility. In such a scenario TQM becomes important. The orientation towards TQM helps in dealing with not only external pressures (customers, suppliers and distributors/dealers etc) but also with in organization (internal employees). Further, Today's economies are dominated by service industries; typically Indian GDP has more percentage of services as compared to manufacturing (www.indianbusiness.nic.in). This accelerated rise in this sector is mainly derived from the pressures of liberalizations and privatization. For example, the education, fast foods, retails, telecommunications, transportation and banking sectors have shown higher growths in the past decade The review of literature highlighted that the studies towards service sector in India are very few. In the developing economies of India, where services contribute a major portion of Indian GDP, the management can't be left on the chance; rather there is a need for its systematic management. In this light the present paper gains importance. Further, the present paper is proposed to study the drivers of TQM in the context of Indian service industries. The present paper is an attempt to highlight challenges and opportunities in Indian service sector. This paper will benefit researchers and practitioners to suggest the directions for growth and also it will help in identifying the areas of weakness and the ways for improvements.