Jamshed Siddiqui

Total quality management and service quality: an exploratory study of quality management practices and barriers in service industry

During the last two decades, the level of total quality management (TQM) awareness has considerably increased in the service industries. With the ever-increasing customer demand, the global competition service industries are forced to re-think to improve their TQM practices and overcome the barriers during the implementation of TQM for maximum benefits. Further, the extent of the literature review reveals that no study has addressed these two issues collectively for service industries. In the light of these facts, the purpose of this study is to identify the TQM practices that are critical for the support of service quality in different types of service industries. It also aims to explore the barriers of TQM implementation so that managers of service industries can work upon them to achieve service quality and customer satisfaction. From the literature review, 17 major TQM practices were found critical for the industry performance. These were frequently used by different researchers in the service industries. Also, a total of 12 major barriers were identified from the literature which hinders the implementation of TQM successfully. The managerial implications, recommendations and scope for future study are presented in the end.

Exploring total quality management for information systems in Indian firms: Application and benefits

Purpose – Considering IS as an integral part of the Indian firms under the purview of this study the paper seeks to investigate the TQM‐IS relationship. Describing total quality management (TQM) on the basis of five principles: top management commitment, customer‐centric advancements, benchmarking, relentless improvement and strengthening the employee base, it aims to analyze the realization of pragmatic goals by Indian firms through TQM for IS.Design/methodology/approach – Data collection was done by mail survey questionnaires. The data set was intended to represent a large variance in their annual turnovers, worth of assets, IS budgets and the segment of the industry to which they catered. Addressed to the top executive In charge of the IS department the survey questionnaire was mailed to 300 Indian companies assumed to be making use of TQM in their information systems department. The questionnaire recipients were selected from a wide array of business areas and the firms belonged to different classes s...

TQM principles' application on information systems for empirical goals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study conducted in Indian companies to evaluate the role of total quality management (TQM) of information systems (IS) in pragmatically realizing organizational goals. As the Indian customer becomes more and more brand savvy – largely owing to the globalization and advertising boom, quality consciousness is doomed to increase and if quality issues in the Indian industry are not addressed in time, competition might lead to its elimination.Design/methodology/approach – This paper explains TQM philosophy on the basis of principles of top management commitment, customer centric advancements of processes, benchmarking for problem solving, relentless improvement and strengthening the employee base. Data were collected through a questionnaire‐based survey of managers. Results were interpreted by multivariate analysis of qualitative responses.Findings – The paper argues that TQM and IS can be quite fruitful in improving the quality of products and services offe...

Book recommendation system using opinion mining technique

With the changing trends in technologies, and brisk growth in Internet, daily life of an individual has also changed at a very fast pace. The impacts of these technologies are so diverse that it has affected almost every sphere of the life. People start using applications of the Internet in their daily life; they prefer online shopping for their needs more and more. For academician, researchers and students, purchasing the desired book from huge collections of books on the Internet is very tedious work. In this paper, we presented a recommendation technique based on opinion mining to propose top ranked books on different discipline of the computer science. Based on the need of the customers and the reviews collected from them, we have categorized features for the books. We analyze the features on the basis of several characteristics that we have categorized and reviews of the users. Weights are assigned to categorized features according to their importance and usage, and accordingly the ranks are given. Finally, top ten ranked books are listed. This method is expected to be helpful for millions of the users who seek for desired books.

OWA based Book Recommendation Technique

Abstract The proliferation of the modern technologies has caused data overload over the Internet. The huge data over the World Wide Web has increased the problems for the users to extract the exact information. Variousrecommendation techniques are being used to help the customers in purchasing the desired items for online shopping. In this paper, we propose a recommendation method for books. We use positional aggregation based scoring (PAS) technique to score the books recommended by top ranked universities and assigned weights to these scores using fuzzy quantifiers. We apply Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) aggregation operator over these scores to find the top books. Finally top ranked books are recommended.

User Feedback Based Evaluation of a Product Recommendation System Using Rank Aggregation Method

The proliferation of the Internet has changed the daily life of a common man. There is a diverse effect of rapid growth of Internet in the daily life. The influence of Internet has changed the way we live and even the way we think. The use of the Internet for purchasing different products of the daily needs has increased exponentially in recent years. Now customers prefer online shopping for the acquisition of the various products. But the huge e-business portals and increasing online shopping sites make it difficult for the customers to go for a particular product. It is very common practice that a customer wishes to know the opinion of other consumers who already have acquired the same product. Therefore we tried to involve the human judgment in recommending the products to the users using implicit user feedback and applied a rank aggregation algorithm on these recommendations. In this paper we chose few products and their respective ranks arbitrarily taken from previous work. For obtaining user’s purchase activities a vector feedback is taken from the user and on the basis of their feedback, products are scored; hence they are again ranked which gives each user’s ranking. We propose a rank aggregation algorithm and apply it on individuals ranking to get an aggregated final users’ ranking. Finally we evaluate the system performance using false negative rates, false positive rates, and precision. These measures show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

User Feedback Scoring and Evaluation of a Product Recommendation System

With the legerity of the Internet, daily life of a common man has changed. Rapid growth of the Internet has a diverse effect on the daily life. The influence of the Internet has changed the way we live and even the way we think. The use of Internet for purchasing different products of the daily needs has increased exponentially in recent years. Now customers prefer online shopping for the acquisition of the various products. But the huge e-business portals and increasing online shopping sites make it difficult for the customers to go for a particular product. It is very common practice that a customer wishes to know the perception of other consumers who already have acquired the same product. Therefore we tried to involve the human judgment in recommending the products to the users using implicit user feedback. In this paper we chose few products and their respective ranks arbitrarily taken from previous work. For obtaining users purchase activities a vector feedback is taken from the user and on the basis of their feedback products are scored, hence they are again ranked which is supposed to be the users ranking. Finally we evaluate the system performance using false negative and false positive rates, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A novel multiprocessor architecture for massively parallel system

Multiprocessor architecture is the main resource to speed up applications by incorporating parallelism among various processing elements. The success of multiprocessor system depends how much efficiently the concurrent processes are managed on the system. This paper proposes a novel multiprocessor architecture which is less complex, easily extensible and inherits most of the desirable topological properties. The proposed system is capable to manage the distributing of parallel tasks efficiently when appropriate scheduling schemes are implemented on it. The comparative study shows that the proposed architecture could be used effectively in various multi-processing applications.

Modelling the TQM enablers and IT resources in the ICT industry: an ISM-MICMAC approach

In the competitive market, information communication and technology ICT became the fastest growing sector in the world and it faces the quality improvement, problem with their products and services that hinder in achieving the leading position in the global market. The main issue related to the quality is to better understand the relationship between the total quality management TQM enablers and information technology IT resources which could enhance the performance of the ICT. The purpose of this study is to identify the TQM enablers along with IT resources and establish the contextual relationship among them by using interpretive structural modelling ISM and also to find out dependency and driving power of enabler/resource with the help of matrix of cross-impact multiplication applied to classification MICMAC analysis. The results of this study will help equip quality experts and managers in TQM and IT implementation in more effective and fruitful ways in ICT industries.

An OWA-Based Ranking Approach for University Books Recommendation: OWA-BASED RANKING APPROACH FOR BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Generally the book recommendation approaches are personalized in nature, that is, they utilize the users’ purchasing behavior to recommend them the book similar to their preferences. The main problem with the personalized recommendation is its knowledge requirement about users’ past preferences. As a result, these techniques fail in producing appropriate recommendation for a new user whose preferences are not known. The personalized recommendation also needs extra space to store the users’ preferences. In this paper, a framework to recommend books to university students for their studies is presented. In order to answer which books are to be included in the syllabus, a specialized way of recommendation, where recommendations from experts of the subjects at different universities are considered, is presented. We have suggested a ranked recommendation approach for books, which employ Ordered Weighted Aggregation (OWA), a fuzzy‐based aggregation, to aggregate the several ranking of the top universities. On the one hand, it does not need user prior preferences, and on the other hand, it eases the complexities of personalized recommendation to huge number of users and replaces it with a single ranked recommendation. The experimental results are compared with the existing positional aggregation algorithm that demonstrates significant improvement in the results with respect to various performance metrics.