International Journal for Quality Research

12

Authors: Mehdi Shojaei, Ardeshir Ahmadi Parisa Shojaei

The aim of this study is Implementation of productivity Management Cycle with Operational Kaizen Approach to Improve Production Performance in Pars Khodro Car Corporation. In this intervention study, all 120 employees of the Pars Khodro Company's Brilliance Body Production Unit were involved. After implementation of 9 steps of Kaizen, Kaizen questionnaire was completed by the staff. The questionnaire of employee performance evaluation was completed by direct supervisor before and after implementation of Kaizen. Finally, the collected data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics using SPSS22. The significance level was considered 0.05. In According to the findings, Kaizen has a significant effect on all functional areas of the staff (Pvalue <0.05). Without much financial investment and new technologies, using the existing facilities and relying on the capabilities and creativity of the organization's staff can be achieved more efficiency.

14

Authors: Albari Antunes Júnior, Evandro Eduardo Broday

This study presented a case study about the application of the PDCA Cycle to analyze and solve the problem of excessive losses of sauce in a process that produces frozen meals in a food industry in Southern Brazil. Through a quantitative and qualitative approach, it was demonstrated the way of implantation of PDCA in the process and its performance as a tool for continuous improvement. The amount of lost sauce was weighed for the calculation of losses as well as a survey of the status of the process indicators prior to the application of the PDCA. Through the use of quality tools, the causes of the problem and their respective solutions were defined through a plan of action. The adoption of the PDCA Cycle reduced losses of sauce by 86.75% due to improvements in the design and operation of the sauce dispensing equipment, leading to an overall improvement of the process as well as evolution in the results of all process indicators.

16

Authors: Inna V. Mitrofanova, Dmitry A. Sheikin, Nikolay P. Ivanov, Oksana Y. Trilitskaya

Analysis of the global practice shows versatile innovative tools of the regional cluster institutional development: in the field of functional institutions it's introduction of the cluster ambassador function into its functional framework, development of training programs for cluster managers and facilitators, elaboration of cluster cooperation patterns with the consumer community; in the field of framework institutions it's introduction of the regional open-government pattern, establishment of specialized body system, encouragement of cluster members' integration into business and social networks; in the field of regulatory strategic institutions it's introduction of the practice of collecting relevant data on clusters beyond industrial and statistical data, development of a special strategy for regional cluster development, promotion of intersectoral and interregional cluster initiatives; in the field of mental institutions it's a shifting focus of strategic developments from competitive advantages to collaborative ones of the region, including marketing, branding and cluster identity establishment.

16

Authors: Jolly Sahni

The value that Quality of work life (QWL) brings to the workplace has long been established by several scholars, however, the impact of QWL on engagement and commitment levels of employees remains under investigated. The present empirical study is devoted to explore the quality of work life in telecom industry and examine its association with employee engagement and organization commitment. The data collected from a random sample of 312 employee working in Telecom industry of Saudi Arabia, was analysed through Descriptive statistics and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Evidence supports the significant relationship of quality of work life and organizational commitment, however, there is a weak link of quality of work life with employee engagement. This is the first study to explore the relationship among three important constructs of workplace; quality of work life, organizational commitment and employee engagement. Therefore, the study significantly contributes to the extant literature on Quality of work life.

16

Authors: Elena Piskun, Vladimir Khokhlov, Natalia Simchenko

An indispensable condition for setting strategy and programs of regional development, which stimulate solution of the tasks for increase of population's life quality, is a retrospective research of socio-economic performances for the purpose of determining the problem aspects and points of economic growth. Therewith, an assessment of economic development should be carried out within interrelation and interdependence of performances. In order to monitor modern economic state of Sevastopol and reveal its growth spurts, we need to uncover the current trends. The most true-to-life results were obtained using a system of simultaneous equations, which allows investigating the influence of external (exogenous) variables on endogenous ones that are integral and describing an economic state of the region. In the course of this study, we modelled economic processes depending on different levels of exogenous variables, which made it possible to reveal latent trends in the dynamic pattern of economic development of Sevastopol subject to irregular results of statistical conclusions.

18

Authors: Ľuboš Elexa, Lenka Hvolková, Ladislav Klement, Vladimíra Klementová, Marcela Kovaľová, Ľudmila Elexová

The article analyzes selected success factors of crowdfunding campaigns in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. As these countries are small in size with limited absorption capacity of crowdfunding markets, we assume that regional projects might be different as to the type, budget and area of implementation than those on international portals. The basic hypotheses are proposed, coming out from existing theories and previous results of research, tested by parametric tests. The methodology combines utilization of several methods - term frequency, trend analysis, quantitative and causal analysis. The results indicate that many projects are not providing important information about their idea (also in form of video spot, connection with social networks and own website), however, still quite large part of them is successful. The analysis also testifies that the most successful crowdfunding campaigns are those oriented on the blogs, travel, community, education and science.

20

Authors: Muthiah Muthukannan, Aruna Sankar Chithambar Ganesh

The manufacturing processes of the ceramic tiles from the raw materials to finished product generate various environmental hazards to the earth and human being. The available literature on the environmental hazards caused by the ceramic industries and assessment methodologies are limited. In this paper, various environmental impacts, the severity of the impacts and various tools used for the assessment of the environmental impacts while manufacturing the ceramic tiles are presented. The details of the ceramic tiles manufacturing process were collected and compiled based on manufacturing process, environmental impacts and assessment methodologies. The results of the study were discussed based on the environmental impact caused by the ceramic industries and the effectiveness of various assessment methodologies. From the literature, it has been identified that manufacturing of the ceramic tiles produces its own amount of harmful and hazardous gases to the environment. It has been observed that an individual ceramic plant produces (15.89 kg CO2-eq) per square meter of the ceramic tiles, which lead to (1.14 x10-5kg CFC 11-eq) ozone layer depletion. Besides, ultrafine and nanosized airborne particles are generated by the production units those particles affect the people. Therefore, it is identified that the ceramic industries provide significant environmental hazards. The literature presented in this paper can be considered significantly for the environmental effects and to have the current status of the environmental impact due to the ceramic industries.

20

Authors: Olatunji Fadeyi, Kehinde Oladele, David Imhonopi, Chijioke Nwachukwu

Qualitative data analysis methods are becoming more and more useful in management sciences. In this paper, an attempt is made to qualitatively ascertain the extent to which effective management succession influences organizational survival. An open-ended interview schedule with 15 questions was administered on 15 randomly selected individuals belonging to top, mid and low level management cadre across 5 money deposit banks in Nigeria. Qualitative content analysis was used to carry out coding of the responses. Cohen Kappa (?) inter-coder reliability test of trustworthiness gave a coding consistency value of 0.86, showing a near-perfect agreement. The final themes generated include; succession ingredients; succession results, and succession checks. It was found that for succession to truly drive an organization towards survival, certain key inputs, otherwise known as ingredients must be in place. Furthermore, the many short-comings in the process of succession must be checked and corrected. If rightly corrected, succession checks could help gain positive results, however, if not carefully monitored, results could be negative.