Yi‐Chan Chung

A study of the business value of Total Quality Management

Many scholars have recently researched the relationship between quality management and performance, but there was no one who had discussed the relationship between quality management and performance from the view of business value. This study focuses on the business value of Total Quality Management (TQM) as we studied the fifteen enterprises of the National Quality Award (Taiwan) from seven industries and used eighteen indices of five perspectives to value them. There were eight conclusions, as follows: (1) the business value of all 15 enterprises was greater than the average industry level; (2) the business value of the electronic industry of the National Quality Award owners was over the average business value of the electronic industry; (3) there was a growth trend of business value in the automobile industry award-winning; (4) there was a downward trend of business value in the iron and steel industry award-winning after they obtained the award for seven years; (5) there was a superior business value of the electrical machinery industry before award-winning than after; (6) the business value of food industry award-winning showed an situation over average industry level after obtained the award seventh year; (7) the business value of plastic and rubber industry was significant over the average industry level; (8) there was a continuous growth trend in the electric and cable industry of the National Quality Award (Taiwan) owners after they obtained the award.

An empirical study on the correlation between Critical DFSS success factors, DFSS implementation activity levels and business competitive advantages in Taiwan's high-tech manufacturers

Quality management is an important topic in the 21st century. Design for Six-Sigma (DFSS) has become a compulsory path to sustained enterprise growth. Enterprises are more focused on their own DFSS activities to attain sustained enterprise operations. This research attempts to study the impact of critical DFSS success factors on DFSS activities implementation and the impact of DFSS activities implementation on business competitive advantages. We considered the intermediate variables of ‘industry group’ and ‘enterprise scale’, and developed a theoretical model of the impact relationship. The empirical analysis results on Taiwans high-tech manufacturers show that the critical success factors for DFSS have a significant impact on DFSS activities implementation. Furthermore, DFSS activities implementation has an essential impact on the two competitiveness dimensions, including cost reduction and differentiation. The research hypothesis ‘the higher the level of DFSS activities implementation, the better the business competitive advantages’ will be supported with statistical significance. The two intermediate variables, industry group and enterprise scale do not show noticeable impacts on DFSS activities implementation and business competitive advantages.

Environmental design implementation in Taiwan's industries

Abstract This study investigated Taiwans industries to identify the characteristics of companies most advanced in environmental design. Thirty design principles in five categories were used to define advanced environmental design. The five categories are: use of raw materials, use of energy, design for recyclability, product life cycle assessment, and packaging optimization. We found that of the 30 design principles only eight were applied consistently by Taiwanese manufacturers. Most effort was given to the “use of energy” category. The most advanced environmental design was found at large companies—those with over 2000 employees, 3 billion in capital, and/or 3 billion in annual sales.

A Study of General Reducing Criteria of Customer‐Oriented Perceived Gap for Hotel Service Quality

In recent years, speedy development of Taiwan’s hotel industry intensifies market competition, customers’ demands on hotel services quality also increase with the increase of their consumption consciousness, and their demands on hotel types diversify, therefore hotel industry should concern on their unique management services quality brought by their different hotel types. The current designed service system or service transmission process may fail to meet customers’ demands owing to emphasizing degree gap in service quality. What is worse, it is difficult for hotel industry to actualize complete customer segregation and to provide customized services, therefore comprehensive understanding of customers’ demands on the service quality of different types hotels would contribute to operating management improvement of Taiwan hotel industry. This paper divides Taiwan hotels into three types: international tourism commercial type, holiday type and motel, the general hotels. It studies the emphasize degree gap in service quality between the industry and the customers. Data analysis shows that service quality gap (perceived gap) of hotels of different types exists in several quality aspects; what’s more, the perceived gaps, service quality aspects, and its items of different types of hotel are also different. After an integrated analysis, this paper puts forward a general and customer‐oriented quality item suitable for hotel industry to shorten the perceived gap of service quality, so that the hotel industry could design a service system and service transfer system, which could meet most lodging customers’ demands in the context of pluralized customer sources.

Research on Using Six Sigma Tool to Reduce the Core Process Time

When facing the global severe competition, the enterprises all try their best to upgrade the quality, reduce the costs to reach the goal of customer satisfaction. Motorola was the earliest firm creating the term Six Sigma (6 σ); GE was the enterprise successfully fulfilling Six Sigma. The success of these two firms revealed the prominent effects and became the worldclass model enterprises. The main purpose of promoting Six Sigma activity was to reduce the possible defects in the business process to the least through designing and monitoring business process in order to reach the goals such as the best quality and efficiency, the lowest costs, the shortest circular process time, maximum profits and customer satisfaction. This research used the Six Sigma technique to improve the business process of ceramics manufacturing plant and find out the major factors of slower core task time by the analytical process of Process Mapping, Pareto Chart, Simul8 simulation software and figures and proposed the improvement measures. Through the confirmation of the case companies, it successfully reduced the core process time and the organizational costs and increased the capacity.

A Study on Service Demand in Customer Relationship Management for Taiwan’s Small and Medium‐sized Enterprise

Due to the global economic effect, Taiwan’s small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) is much threatened by China. Since remarkable advances have being made in information technology, taking competition advantage for an enterprise has become a very important issue when facing rigorous global competition. However, the business of the enterprise starts with finding the customers’ demands, and ends with fufilling customers’ demands. Therefore, in order to increase competition advantage for SME, the customer management must be effectively strengthened, especially by increasing customer satisfaction and maintaining good relationship with the customer. This is the key for an enterprise leading to success. The purpose of this study is aiming to discussing the relationship analysis between customer and SME by viewing the four aspects of customer relationship management (CRM), which are relation marketing, customer service, customer value, and customer satisfaction. Moreover, this research will perform an empirical analysis on CRM for a typical small and medium‐sized company so as to grasp its real definition and enterprises’ demands. The conclusions will be drawn from our literature survey and practical experience as well as site investigation. Recommendations are evolved from discussing the interaction between customers and enterprises in improving their constructing factors and increasing benefits and values.

A Study of Environmental Management Investment Allocation

The 21st century is a new century of environmental protection. Environmental protection is one of the most important subject matters yet to come. Moreover, as the public pays more attention to environmental problems, enterprises should increase their investment in environmental management. Therefore, determining the investment level for environmental management and allocating the investment to associated environmental management activities has become a major task. The principal and agent theory and sales response functions are used for analysis in this research. The allocation of capital investment in environmental management is found to have significant impact on the aggregate sales response, aggregate profit and investment level. Therefore, in preparing the budget for environmental management, enterprises should focus on investment allocation decisions, determine the investment level and allocation method using integrated means, and apply submarket data in the allocation decision‐making process. In other words, in setting the investment level, executive management should take managers’ willingness into consideration. In allocating capital investment, managers should identify the optimal allocation method based on submarket characteristics.

Using Balanced Scorecard to Explore Learning Performance of Enterprise Organization

In the early industrial age which with high intensity of machine and labor, using financial measurement index was good enough to tie in company’s mechanization and philosophy of management and been in efficiency. But being comply with “New Economic age,” a new economic environment is full of knowledge and information, the enterprise competition had changed from tangible assets, plants to intangible innovation ability of knowledge. As recognizing the new tendency by enterprise, they value gradually the growth and influence from learning. Practice of organization learning not only needs firm structure and be in coordination with both hardware and software, but also needs an affect measurement model to offer enterprise to estimate learning performance. It’s a good instrument of financial performance measure mold in the past years, But it’s for measuring the past, couldn’t formulate enterprise trend to future, hard to estimate investment for future, such as development of products, organization learning, knowledge management etc, as which intangible assets and knowledge ability just the key factors of being win around competition environment in the future. In 1992, Kaplan and Norton brought up Balance Scorecard (BSC) on Harvard Business Review, as an instrument helping enterprise to measure performance, which is being considered to be a most influence management instrument. It added non‐financial index such as customer, internal process and learning growth besides traditional financial index, as offering enterprise an index to measure and manage intangible assets and intellectual property. As being aware of organization learning is hard to be ignored in the new economic age, this research is based on learning and growth of BSC, and citing one national material company try to let the most difficult measurement performance of organization learning, to be estimate through BSC, analyze of factor and individual case, to discuss the company how to make the related strategy and vision of organization learning to develop learning and growth of the structure of BSC, subject the matter of out put factors to be discussed, and measure the outcomes as a result of research. The research affect offers (1) the base implement procedure of carrying out BSC; (2) the reference of formulating measurement index while enterprise using BSC to estimate performance of organization learning; (3) the possibility bottleneck maybe forcing while carrying out BSC, to be an improvement or preventive for enterprise.

A study of Constructing Knowledge Management for Taiwan’s Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises by Successful Factors

In the Knowledge‐based Economic Era, all of the enterprises are facing global competitive pressure. The activities of knowledge accessing, codifying, and application will ogviously become the main inner function on enterprise operation. Knowledge will be the primary competitive advantage; therefore, he who wants to hold the competitive advantage should do the knowledge management (KM) very well. In this study, we cconstruct the research dimensions and variances by the successful factors of KM, which had been practiced very well by big enterprises inside and outside our country, and which was recommended by the related scholars. In order to approach the differences between big enterprises and small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) towards implementing KM, this study takes the way of questionnaire investigation to do empirical analysis and to construct the model of KM by path analysis. The study found out when implementing KM, SMEs should highlight “leadership”, “library‐architecture”, and “corporate culture” these three aspects, while “information technology” and “performance evaluation” these two aspects show no remarkable influence. It shows that he who wants to construct KM might not too overweight on information technology to build the KM system. Therefore, we suggest when implementing KM enterprises should reinforce the corporate culture by sharing, organized KM process, learning environment for all employees, and highly authorization by top managers in order to reach the expectant success of KM. The result of this study offers practical thinking directions to reach the expectant success for the policy makers in SMEs, who are accessing to or evaluating to implement KM.

Comparison of Relative Risk before and after SEMI S2‐93A Implementation: Using a Semiconductor Plant in a Taiwan’s Science Park as an Example

The objective of this study is to evaluate the equipment risk before and after SEMI S2‐93A implementation, thus providing a guideline for safety improvement. Semiconductor Plant A located in Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Based Industrial Park with 147 manufacturing machines was used for risk assessment. The study was carried out in three steps. First, a preliminary hazard analysis was conducted. A detailed process safety evaluation was conducted (Hazard and Operability Study, HAZOP); and finally, the equipment risk comparison before and after Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Instruction (SEMI S2‐93A) implementation. The preliminary hazard analysis results showed high risk in 21.77 per cent of the manufacturing machines under risk assessment at Plant A. The largest percentage existed in the Diffusion Department. The machine types specified by the hazardous work site review and inspection according to Article 26 of Labor Inspection Regulation (the machines that use such chemicals as, SiHi, HF, HCL, etc. and that are determined to be highly hazardous through preliminary hazard analysis) were added to the detailed process analysis and evaluation. In the third part of this evaluation, the machines at Plant A used for detailed process safety assessment were divided into two groups based on the manufacturing data before and after 1993. The severity, possibility, and actual accident analysis before and after SEMI S2‐93A implementation were compared. The semiconductor Equipment Manufacturing Instruction (SEMI S2‐93A) implementation can reduce the severity and possibility of hazard occurrence.