Total quality management (TQM) has been acclaimed as an organizational philosophy to enhance global competitiveness. Will TQM continue to be a management philosophy of the future in same shape, size, and design? This paper, through literature search and using field experts, identifies the future role of TQM in businesses facing global markets.
Quickly responding to customer needs has become a major priority for retail businesses such as grocery operations. Customer satisfaction is an absolute for staying competitive in these retail operations. This paper discusses efficient consumer response (ECR) as a supply chain strategy in grocery businesses by analyzing the adoption of ECR strategy by five major grocery operations in US markets. Furthermore, a management action plan is presented for future adoption of ECR strategy by similar business operations.
The intent of this empirical research is to identify the critical factors that are potentially “fatal” to productivity improvement programs and to analyze these factors relative to documented quality concepts. From this analysis we determine that these “fatal” factors can be prevented by the pre‐existence of a quality program, specifically total quality management, which requires participative involvement of all members of an organization, continuous improvement, and customer satisfaction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.