G. Meek

The Impact of ISO Certification on the Levels of Awareness and Usage of Quality Tools and Concepts: A Survey of Turkish Manufacturing Companies

Total quality management and the implementation of quality systems have become major initiatives of companies throughout the world over the last 20 years. This is especially true for companies that are doing or wish to do business in the European Community. For many of these companies, however, ISO certification has become a prerequisite when exporting their products. Companies must be able to demonstrate that they have the systems in place to provide a quality product if they wish to be competitive in the global marketplace. This article presents results of a survey of Turkish manufacturing companies. The study included 140 large Turkish manufacturing firms and investigates important relationships dealing with quality and the implementation of quality tools in Turkish manufacturing companies. The results lead to a greater understanding of the implementation of statistical tools and the relationship between the application of these tools and ISO certification in Turkey. Some of the results were surprising. There appeared to be significant differences in usage between ISO certified companies and noncertified companies for most of the basic standard quality tools but on only four of the advanced tools. ISO certified companies used more standard, basic quality tools than noncertified companies. Of the 13 advanced tools, however, the ISO certified companies used only four of them much more frequently. In addition, noncertified companies did not use any quality tool significantly more than ISO certified companies.

Measurement Variation between Analogue and Digital Equipment

Recently, manufacturing companies have been evaluating measurement equipment used for in‐process inspection. The precision and accuracy of the measurement operation are a major factor of an overall quality control programme. Compares two measurement systems of scales and callipers in three laboratory settings for the purpose of identifying sources of significant differences in measurements. The experimental design used was a nested and crossed design with blocking on manufactured parts. Operators and types of equipment (digital and analogue) were nested within laboratories and crossed with one another. Finds, at a significance level of 0.001, that variation exists among laboratories and between types of scales, while, for callipers, significant variation occurred among laboratories, between types of callipers and between operators.