A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Advanced Technologies

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1997

Competition in the world market has increased rapidly and continuously, causing companies to adapt their management and strategies in order to survive. Total Quality Management is one choice which has been accepted globally because it can play a key role. Though its main purpose is to make sustainable profit for the organization, the styles of implementation differ among companies for many reasons such as business characteristics, organizational culture and nationality. Consequently, the assessment of TQM practice is not identical either. Japanese TQM (called CWQC or TQC) is the one which has been widely implemented in many companies in Thailand. But there are no any national criteria or awards to identify or measure the practice. However, the flexibility of the Japanese quality award - Deming Prize - makes it available for companies outside Japan to apply. This study is an effort to adapt the Deming Prize criteria to perform an assessment in a Japanese venture company as a self-assessment case. The framework includes nine elements - Policy, Organization, Human resource development, Quality assurance activities, Daily management and improvement activities, Standardization, Information and data, Effects and Future planning. It is firstly developed, then check points following the criteria are established. An approach using scoring procedure for assessing quality management is applied. Three sets of questionnaire for three different groups of people - senior executives, employees and customers - are created based on the framework. The surveys were conducted according to the types of questionnaire. Two senior executives, one hundred and forty four employees, and twenty six customers gave the responses. Weights of the elements were estimated by the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with the relative importance scores given by a senior executive. The quality management practice in the elements are estimated from their average values. The calculations also include the Principal Component Analysis for satisfaction values. Finally, the practices are analyzed and discussed element by element. The analysis includes the comparisons of employees' level and department practices tlu·ough the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The results show that, the company's overall practice is at a high level of success by a 80.3% normalized score, and indicate some practice differences in both employees' level and departments. The assessment can also identify strengths and weaknesses of the company's practice in the elements, thereby providing useful information for the company to make further improvement toward excellence.