Total Quality Management for Micro-businesses in the Manufacturing Industry
Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Engineering -
Industrial Engineering and Management, grade: 1,7, Technical
University of Berlin (Wirtschaft und Management), course:
Technologie- und Innovationsmanagement, language: English,
abstract: PurposeQuality management models such as ISO 9001:2000 or
excellence awards serve as quality guides for large and
medium-sized organizations. There is nothing similar in the field
for micro-businesses, i.e. businesses up to 20 employees. This
thesis aims to lay down the foundation for a large-scale field
study. The study shall unveil which areas of a company are
essential to be addressed by a basic Quality Management System in
order to optimize competitiveness, customer satisfaction and
business results. The desired result of the study is to be able to
make recommendations for an ideal total Quality Management System
for micro-businesses in the manu-facturing
industry.Design/Methodology/ApproachBased on an extensive
literature review on quality management in small businesses and
micro-businesses, criteria of quality awards and TQM practices in
general, a framework was developed, called Micro TQM for
Micro-businesses Framework similar to those of famous quality
awards, such as the MBNQA or the EFQM Award . Supported by experts
from Stevens Institute of Tech-nology (Hoboken, NJ), industry
associations, and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, a questionnaire
was developed for a subsequent field study. Findings First of all
the Micro TQM for Micro-businesses Framework has been created based
on a literature review. The other output of this thesis is the
quality man-agement questionnaire whose sections are linked to the
elements of the framework. The questionnaire is made to test six
hypotheses about cause-and-effect relations in the model. The
main-hypothesis of this thesis is: Companies that focus their
quality effort proactively on prevention of non-conformances excel
in customer satisfaction which leads to superior overall
performance. Subsequent steps of the study will need to corroborate
the hypotheses.
