Assessment Of Total Quality Management Implementation Level In Small & Meduim Enterprises

As many small organizations have been slow to implement TQM, see Ghobadian & Gallear (1996), today's TQM models and implementation strategies do not seem to have addressed the key characteristics of small organization. Small organizations should not be call for a more customized implementation approach. This means that there is a need for an implementation framework adapted to small organizations, see for example, Yusof & Aspinwall (2000), and the area of TQM implementation in small organizations needs further scrutiny. This calls for further investigation of the implementation level of TQM in SM organizations and also identifying important aspects for implementation of TQM in Small organizations.Based on the current TQM implementation in Chinese SMEs, this research aims at achieving the following research objectives: (1) To investigate the implementation level of TQM in Chinese SMEs (2)To identify which quality activities are mostly implemented in Chinese SMEs. Based on these research objectives, three research questions (listed below) have been proposed.Question 1: What is TQM?Question 2: What are the important aspects in implementing TQM?Question 3: What is the implementation level of TQM in Chinese SMEs?Based on the three research questions proposed in this study, the research strategies of a literature review and questionnaire survey were adopted in this research. The literature review identified what the concept of TQM is and what important aspects should be considered in implementing TQM for. Thus, the first and second research questions were answered. the third question is to examine the level of TQM implementation on Chinese SMEs. A questionnaire survey was the most appropriate strategy to answer this research question. The questionnaire was sent to 100 large & SMEs and collected with in two months with a response rate of 60%. Out of the total of 60 companies, only 10 organizations were large but the rest that is 50 organizations were SMEs. The collected data was put in to SPSS for windows version 14 for empirically testing and validating the reliability and validity of the measurement scales. The data was found to be valid and reliable.In this study, it was found that there is a significant difference in TQM implementation among the large and SMEs and also between manufacturing & service SMEs but insignificant difference between ISO certified and non certified SMEs. Attempt has been made to assess the level of TQM implementation in the organizations identified as SMEs in China. The organizations were found to have a medium level of TQM implementation. The inter-relatedness of the TQM constructs in the SMEs in this study can be used to underline the point that organizations should not select certain quality practices and ignore others, since all the constructs serve as building blocks of the TQM philosophy.This study has also attempted to assess which quality management initiatives are more implemented among the Chinese manufacturing SMEs. Production planning and control and, internal quality audit are found to be the first and the second highest degree of practices respectively and the third highest practice shared between statistical process control and quality costing. The three least implemented quality activities were found to be initiating supplier improvement activities, statistical sampling and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)...