SUPPLY CHAIN QUALITY MANAGEMENT- AN EMPERICAL STUDY

Abstract

Quality management and Supply Chain Management are two terms that have clearly stood out as management phenomenon in the past two decades. Organizations are implementing total quality management as an important tool to improve their business performance. In the past two decades there has also been an increasing emphasis on supply chain management as an important vehicle to gaining a competitive edge. Companies are more and more concentrating on improving the overall efficiency of their whole supply chains. With increased interdependence of one organization on another, it gets very tough to limit management strategies within the organization. Quality also is no more about quality in enterprise rather quality is a supply chain factor. This thesis discusses integration of these two principles. It reviews earlier works by other authors as well. It draws a parallel between these two and discusses how Quality and supply chain management are critically related. We define supply chain management (SCM), total quality management (TQM) and supply chain quality management (SCQM) to operationalize and understand their effect and increased emphasis on supply chain. We review current research in quality management and identify common themes found in the literature. Next a research model is developed to study the relationship between supply chain management and total quality management. An empirical study was done with the help of a survey to study the relationship between total quality management and supply Chain management. In the results a very strong relationship was found between quality performance and physical performance of an organization. Also strong relationships were found between other constructs of supply chain management and total quality management.