International Journal for Quality Research

6

Authors: Filipa Fonseca, Sofia Pinto, Carlos Brito

The objective of the paper is to identify the determinants of service quality as well as its impact on the satisfaction of public transport commuters. The paper explores the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction in a public transport service taking into account both internal and external perspectives. In order to analyse this relationship, the concepts of service quality, consumer satisfaction and dissatisfaction are assessed. A model of analysis is developed aiming at explaining this relationship and guiding the empirical study. This is based on an exploratory case study of a metro company in Europe. The results of the study put in evidence two key findings. The first is related to the level of service quality in its main dimensions. We conclude that reliability, security, speed, comfort and punctuality are quality dimensions of greater importance for the public transport services. Secondly, the study explores satisfaction and their determinants. Despite literature stipulates the existence of a distinction between the constructs of quality and satisfaction, this study found that the transport company, non-customers and customers clearly do not make such a distinction.

7

Authors: Boris Agarski, Igor Budak, Janko Hodolic, Djordje Vukelic

Environment is important and inevitable element that has direct impact on life quality. Furthermore, environmental protection represents prerequisite for healthy and sustainable way of life. Environmental quality can be represented through specific indicators that can be identified, measured, analyzed, and assessed with adequate methods for assessment of environmental quality. Problem of insight in total environmental quality, caused by different, mutually incomparable, indicators of environmental load and difficult expression of overall environment quality, can be solved with multicriterial assessment. This paper presents appliance of multicriterial methods for analysis of indicators that represent environmental quality for several sites.

9

Authors: Prasun Das, Shubhabrata Datta

Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS) is a pattern information technology, which has been used in different diagnostic applications to make quantitative decisions by constructing a multivariate measurement scale using data analytic methods, without any assumption regarding statistical distribution. It uses a threshold value computed through quadratic loss function approach for the future diagnosis. However, the procedure for determining the threshold is lacking statistical explanation and primarily dependent on the domain expertise, if available, from the respective field. This study makes an alternate attempt to determine a threshold value using the property of multivariate statistical distributions related to Mahalanobis D2, used for MTS, and the critical values of the distributions for different levels of significance. The findings of the study can be used to eliminate the subjectivity of MTS in compliance to its data analytic philosophy.

12

Authors: Dauw-Song Zhu, Chih-Te Lin, Chung-Hung Tsai, Ji-Fu Wu

As stated by the recent report published by Global Industry Analysts Inc. (GIA), driven by widespread consumer awareness, lifestyle trends and growing compatibility among equipments because of standardization, the world digital camera market is projected to reach 122 million units by the year 2010. The traditional one-way quality model is focused on one particular quality element; only when the element is present are customers satisfied, and viceversa. Using the traditional way to improve customer satisfaction, it is possible that the customer will not be satisfied with a certain quality element, or maybe the customer satisfaction target will be over-fulfilled (Tan & Shen, 2000). Kano's model provides an effective approach to categorizing the customer attributes into different types. Professor Kano has developed a methodology to identify which customer attributes are must-be, which are one-dimensional and which are attractive. Therefore, understanding the product quality attribute is beneficial to improvement of quality as well as product development. Therefore, the purposes of this article are 1. To classify customer attributes into Kano categories. 2. To apply IPA to analyze the correlation between importance and satisfaction toward product attributes. 3. To exam a significant difference between demographic characteristics and Kano's quality requirements. The findings are as follows: 1. Kano' model successful classifying product features of digital cameras. Kano's quality requirements are also correlated with importance and satisfaction of IPA analysis. 2. When quality have improved for all product features, after sales services, Image Stabilizer and Recording Mode will lead to most satisfaction for all users based on customer satisfaction coefficient. 3. Demographical characteristics have significantly influenced perceived quality requirement for digital camera users.