AUTHOR
Grip, Johan; Soini, Kai

DATE
2000-04-26

DEPARTMENT
Business Administration and Social Sciences / Industrial marketing and e-commerce

SUMMARY
Having an effective and efficient organisation is a necessity to staying competitive in today’s market place. By implementing the concept of Total Quality Management, organisations may experience increased productivity, improvements in employee relations and profitability, greater customer satisfaction as well as increased market share. However, before implementing Total Quality Management, critical success factors must be identified and addressed.

We investigated which critical success factors, focused on by management, have lead to “business excellence”. Further, we determined why these factors are important and how they are used. In order to achieve this a multiple case study has been conducted on four Swedish Quality Award winners.

Our findings are that the factors Mission, Vision and Goal’s, followed by Employee Involvement, Management Commitment and External Partners are the most important factors to address for organisations that aim at becoming “business excellence” organisations.

ISSN 1404-5508 / ISRN LTU-SHU-EX--00/081--SE / NR 2000:081