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Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MTech(Business Administration))--Cape Technikon, Cape Town,1996 / All organisations, profit as well as nonprofit, are increasingly coming to the realization that trying to compete solely on costs leads to ineffectiveness and a weaker financial position. Competing on the basis of product or service differentiation is becoming increasingly futile because products and services are becoming less and less unique. To ensure survival, effectiveness and competitiveness, organisations must provide services of exceptionally high quality. Providing services of high quality has proven to be the single most important factor contributing to organisational success and well-being. Providing services of superb quality also presents an important opportunity for organisational differentiation. A major requirement for successful management is effective measurement. This study is motivated by the limited research and resulting limited literature available on this subject in social work. The development of the SERVQUAL instrument offers a possible reliable and valid device for the measurement of service quality in social work. However, SERVQUAL has not been subjected to rigorous testing for reliability and validity in a social work organisation. In this research SERVQUAL was used to measure the quality of services in a social work organisation. The aim of this research was to determine the applicability, reliability and validity of the instrument in a social work organisation. Attention was given to literature that focuses on service quality, its measurement and management. The empirical research involved executives, social workers and clients of the social work organisation. It was found that SERVQUAL can be applied to social work services and it proved to be a reliable and valid instrument for measuring service quality. However, further research is necessary to improve the quality of services to clients and directions for future research are indicated.

Total Quality Management (TQM) has become a popular term in quality improvement management. Many organizations, however, frequently implement quality tools that are not well coordinated with the established quality principles or the managerial decisions and actions. This research focuses on studying three major quality management components: quality philosophies, interventions, and tools. The primary desired outcome of this research is to improve the understanding of TQM implementation. The means to accomplish this desired outcome included reviewing quality improvement philosophies of Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum, Crosby, and Ishikawa, and conducting multiple case studies. The eight organizations vary in their organizational type (service or manufacturing), years of experience in their TQM efforts, and their sizes (number of employees). The case studies involved interviewing the quality managers and described how they define and implement TQM. A quality improvement taxonomy, a two-dimensional matrix, is a product developed as a result of this study. The first dimension of the taxonomy describes the quality interventions--the organizational planned changes for improving quality, which are categorized by six quality checkpoints: management of upstream systems, incoming quality assurance, in-process quality management, outgoing quality assurance, proactive assurance of customer satisfaction, and the overall quality management process. The second dimension lists seventeen supporting quality management tools. They include tools such as the Input/Output Analysis, Quality Function Deployment, Competitive Benchmarking, and Statistical Process Control. Organizations can use this quality improvement taxonomy to communicate the TQM concept and to improve coordination of quality management tools with the overall TQM implementation decisions and actions. / Master of Science

This thesis is focused on the example of process approach used as the tool for quality management in a real company. The aim of this paper is to get readers acquaint with quality control management eight principles from the ISO/IEC 9001 perspective. The thesis then elaborates the practical site of process management approach. The paper describes process management evolution stages, its benefits, there are introduced specific types of modelling methods and ways for process performance measurement. The implementation of process approach is then shown on practical example. The thesis's practical part provides process charts for key organization processes drafted according to the one selected modelling method, descriptions for such processes, suggestions for change aiming to process optimisation and finally also proposes measurable process performance indicators.