Zulema Lopes Pereira

European quality management practices

The patterns of adoption of quality management practices and techniques vary across national boundaries. This article presents the findings of a questionnaire survey into the quality management procedures and tools adopted in three European countries, the UK, Portugal and Finland. A total of 450 responses are analysed. The main differences between the three countries are outlined with regard to factors motivating the implementation of quality systems, quality tools and techniques used, outcomes from quality management and problems encountered in providing quality training. The results are then analysed under the perspective of the probable impact of national culture. The models of national culture developed by Hofstede, Trompenaars and Earley and Erez were used for this purpose. The main conclusion is that these models can help to explain, to a great extent, much of the variation observed and constitute a basis for understanding why particular quality management approaches are adopted.

Multiple response optimization: a global criterion‐based method

Processes and products have by nature many quality characteristics that must be in some sense optimized simultaneously. With this aim, a method which can be used easily and efficiently by practitioners for optimizing multi‐response problems is proposed. Implementation steps and considerations, in addition to optimization measures to assess methods solutions and guide the analyst in finding an effective compromise solution, are also presented. Three classical examples from the literature are used to assess the performance of several prominent methods in the response surface methodology (RSM) framework and help practitioners make a better‐informed choice among them. Copyright

The role of TQM in strategic product innovation: an empirical assessment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of total quality management (TQM) resources on strategic product innovation. It addresses the apparent tension between quality management and innovation management and seeks empirical support for the proposition that quality management resources can be used to support strategic innovation. Based on resource-based view, it defines key resources that firms develop during implementation of TQM systems: TQM culture, product design capability, and process improvement capability – and assesses the role of these resources in the success of product innovation. Design/methodology/approach – A survey of 112 manufacturing firms was conducted and the resulting data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) to determine how TQM constructs affect strategic product innovation. Findings – The main finding suggests that only product design capability contributes to strategic product innovation. TQM culture has a direct influence on process improvement and pr...

Service recovery at a financial institution

Empirical research on quality improvement in service organisations has been growing in recent years but it still lags behind the developments observed in manufacturing. It has been generally recognised that more research is needed in the field, especially with regard to the application of quantitative methods that can help managers in the decision‐making process. Results of research carried out in a bank are presented, focusing the main aspects of the service recovery process after a complaint has occurred. A specific methodology is proposed to analyse the failures and corresponding complaints in service delivery, with the ultimate goal of articulating internal and external measures of performance. The methodology provides a better knowledge of the impact caused by operational factors (internal measures) on customer perceptions (external measures), so that management actions can then be taken accordingly.

Process capability in services

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to develop an index for assessing service capability when the customer considers satisfactory a certain range of service performance, the so‐called zone of tolerance.Design/methodology/approach – Literature on service research and statistical process control (SPC) was used to develop a conceptual approach that is later worked out for implementation. Some of the quality function deployment principles are used in the approach to articulate customer perceptions and expectations with parameters of service performance.Findings – It is demonstrated that traditional capability indices do not cope properly with service performance characterized by a zone of tolerance and that the new capability index, proposed by the authors, is more than adequate to deal with the specific features of services.Research limitations/implications – It was assumed that performance levels within the zone of tolerance are not perceived as different by customers and that service performance coul...

Multiresponse Optimization and Pareto Frontiers

Methods that can capture evenly distributed solutions along the Pareto frontier are useful for multiresponse optimization problems because they provide a large variety of alternative solutions to the decision maker from among a set of nondominated solutions. However, methods often used for optimizing dual and multiple dual response problems have been rarely evaluated in terms of their ability to capture those solutions. This article provides this information by evaluating a global criterion–based method and the popular weighted mean square error method. Convex and nonconvex response surfaces were considered, and results of the methods were compared with those of a lexicographic approach on the basis of two examples from the literature. Regarding the results, it is shown that the user can be successful in capturing Pareto solutions in convex and nonconvex regions using the global criterion–based method. Moreover, it is shown that the starting point affects the distribution of solutions along the Pareto frontier but is not pivotal to obtain a complete representation of the Pareto frontier. For this purpose, it is necessary to decrease the weight increment and to compute for more solutions. Copyright

Total quality management versus business process re-engineering

Abstract Much has been written recently on the advantages of implementing business process re-engineering (BPR) rather than total quality management (TQM). This article describes the main principles of the BPR methodology, and presents the main reasons for failure in the implementation, as focused on by various authors. A summary of the current debates on TQM versus BPR follows. The main conclusions about the differences between the two methodologies are discussed and a proposal for integrating them is offered. It is concluded that the major features for achieving success within an organization are the definition of its mission and goals, an adequate analysis of current processes and an appropriate choice of processes for improvement. This will determine whether the change has to be radical or not.

Decision-Making in the Analysis of Unreplicated Factorial Designs

ABSTRACT Economical and technical reasons, as well as time-related constraints, have contributed considerably to the increasing use of unreplicated factorial designs. Various methods have been proposed in the literature to identify location effects in unreplicated factorial designs, but one method that performs well in all cases has not been found. For this reason, this article presents multiple tests that apply computational methods with different forms. The selected methods are reviewed and their application is justified and illustrated with examples, including one original case study.

Off-line quality control applied to food products

Many applications of off-line Taguchi methods have been reported, especially over the past six years, in areas such as the automotive, plastics and electronic industries. However, case studies in the food industry have been very rare. This work describes the first part of a research programme in which a combination of classical design of experiments and of Taguchi concepts was used to study the effect of six factors on the characteristics of a certain biscuit. The main achievement was a considerable reduction in the variation of biscuit length.

Responses modeling and optimization criteria impact on the optimization of multiple quality characteristics

Responses modeling and optimization criteria impact on the optimization results were investigated. The Ordinary Least Squares and Seemingly Unrelated Regression techniques were illustrated in two examples from the literature and the performance of three optimization criteria evaluated. In contrast to the standard practice, compromise solutions were evaluated in terms of bias and robustness using optimization performance measures. The results of both examples show that responses modeling strongly impacts on the optimization results, while there is no significant difference between criteria performance. The Seemingly Unrelated Regression technique proved to be useful for modeling correlated responses. Otherwise, this technique can lead to results in close agreement to those obtained with models fitted with the OLS technique.