| Rapid changes in the business environment, driven by competitive pressures and business complexity, present challenges that organizations cannot address without the support of their suppliers. In the past decades, performance evaluation factors such as quality, delivery, and price have been widely used by organizations to measure their suppliers' performance. Traditional supplier performance dimensions now considered to be only single dimensional, and not guarantee long term success of an organization. Use of internationally recognized standards and guidelines such as ISO 9000, MBNQA are recommended to be feasible for supplier Quality Management System evaluation in the literature. However, their effectiveness as a supplier evaluation tool has not been empirically tested. In this dissertation, relationships between Organization Performance dimensions and QMS criteria using MBNQA dimensions are explored.; Organizational Performance questionnaire that is developed by the researcher is used to determine the Performance Level of the supplier organizations. QMS performance of the supplier organizations is measured using a questionnaire developed at the University of Missouri-Rolla by Wu (1996). Suppliers of an OEM company in Virginia are surveyed. The regression analysis and canonical correlation analysis results of this dissertation show that there are relationships among the QMS dimensions using MBNQA criteria and Organizational Performance dimensions. The relationships are complex and often counteractive. Relationship models between QMS criteria and organizational Performance Dimensions are developed for the organizations participated in the study and finally, conclusions are drawn and recommendations made for future research. |
