The last twenty or so years have seen a great interest in quality management systems that have initiated a large number of studies. These studies examined, amongst the rest, the impact of quality methods in companies, implementation techniques, and tried to discover the reasons behind the failure or success of these methods. A portion of them investigated the issue of quality on different companies' sizes and another part the effect on national culture and/or the influence of industrial sector. In most of the cases though the research was focused in one aspect only, either that was size, culture or sector. This work attempts to investigate the effect of both size and culture. Furthermore, It tries to find the elements missing of the current literature that make these systems not appealing in a great percentage of companies, specially small sized ones. If quality tools improve performance, productivity and business results in general, why so many companies seem to ignore them? Can the same systems that originated in Japan and influenced by Americans be implemented in every country around the globe, regardless of size and sector? What special features have to be considered, if there are any, during the implementation process when the company is located in Scotland or Greece or Sweden? This thesis attempts to answer these questions by researching in the present literature and using the feedback obtained from Scottish and Greek companies of five different sectors. Finally, it proposes a new self assessment tool that applies to small manufacturing companies and considers the special characteristics of each culture with the addition of taking into account the quality level of the company.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:557117 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Viza, Evi |
| Publisher | University of the West of Scotland |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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