International Journal for Quality Research

6

Authors: Laxmana Naik, Rajan Sharma, Raju Naik, Girish Lakshmana, Karuna Devi

A lean laboratory is one which is focused on testing products and materials to deliver results in the most e fficient way in terms of cost or speed or both; primarily focused on improvi ng measurable performance and reducing costs. The goal of a lean laboratory is to use less effort, le ss resources and less time to test incoming samples. Laborator ies have a critical role to play in establishing and improving process c apability and key performance indicator (KPI) of the organization. There are inevi tably many opinions as to what a lean lab actually is; here is one version fr om. Quality assurance laboratories are crucial to the success of organization and this effectiveness needs to be measurable and demonstrable. To facil itate this, a method of measuring a laboratory's progress towards complete deployment has been created by lean tools. These tools allow laboratorie s to conduct gap analysis and identify opportunities for improvement.

8

Authors: K.Venkata Subbaiah, K. G.Durga Prasad, M. Uma Bharathi, K. Soma Sekhara Rao

In this paper an attempt has been made to propose a methodolog y f or identifying and prioritiz ing the user needs pertaining to library services. I n order to categorize the user needs into quality dimensions, Factor analysi s has been carried out on user re sponses obtained through questionnair e s urvey. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed to determine th e priority ratings of the library quality di mensions. The priority structure of th e quality dimension s provides an idea for the library management to allocat e the resources in an effective manner to achieve more user satisfaction. A cas e study is presented to demons trate the proposed methodology.

8

Authors: M. Ahsan Akhtar Hasin, Sudipa Sarker, Nouroz Islam, M. A. Shareef

Purpose - Healthcare service quality and customer satisfactio n have been a major research issue over the decade. Customer satisfaction ha s been measured by different researchers under varied environment. A s environment varies, desires of cust omers and the perception of satisfactio n vary. As a result, a major issue is to define the complex nature of custome r s atisfaction under varied environment. On the other hand, a compromisin g trade-off is required in operational cost in the wake of increase in cost t o uplift service quality. This research addr essed the issue from the context o f Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach - This research used SERVQUAL, which is a very powerful tool to measure service quality. The study utilized the benef i of hierarchical nature of satisfac tion. Service quality was analyzed fro m customers' view point, as well as th e service providers, such as doctor s nurses, etc. Finally hypothesis tests we re performed to investigate into th e possibility of relationships among th e affecting quality parameters and th e output service. This analysis was based on customer's perception, as well a s expectation. Findings - The research found the values of service quality parameters, suc h as tangibles, doctoral service, nu rsing, infrastructure and management. Th e established fact of dependence of perception of quality on culture has bee n proved once again. The relationship am ong conflicting parameters were als o f ound using hypothesis testing. Alt hough the study was conducted in th e context o f Bangladesh, the analysis procedure is well applicable to othe r countries. Originality/value - The study proved that the hierarchical nature o f s atisfaction can well be analyzed usi ng the powerful tool of SERVQUAL. Th e dependence of customer satisfaction on service quality has been assumed t o be a function of market segmentati on and customer perception. This resu l can guide many of the future research works in further analysis of comple x nature of service quality and customer satisfaction.

10

Authors: Biljana Tesic

The role of management information systems (MIS) of local treasuries budget accounting is to pr ovide qualitative information support to management in process of deci sion making and to provide effective managing of key processes of budget accounting, in accordance with requests of management on all levels of decision making. From the aspect of effectiveness and request for quality, in accordance with request of users and defined system goals, this rese arch includes the analysis of characteristics and goals of identified key processe s, critical succecs factors (CSF), key performance indicators (KPI), standards for realization of users requests, results of processes and indicators of goals realisation. The aim of this paper, based on the re sults of the analysis, is to develop models for evaluation of quality and effectiveness and to define key performance indicators of MIS of budget accounting, in order to perceive the level of achievemen t of the goals of the system, effectiveness of processes and level of fulfillment of requirements and needs of all users groups that are significant for budge t accounting of local treasuries.

11

Authors: Pratima Mishra, Rajiv Kumar Sharma

The greatest continuing area of weakness in management practice is to evaluate human dimensions. The aim of this research is to evaluate the human dimensions which can prove for succe ssful implementation of Six- sigma through teams. This paper discusses the available dimensions of supply chain management (SCM) practices in lite rature and develops an integrated framework (6 ? +SCM) based upon ten human dimens ions of SCM practice ( (i) Self management, (ii) Participation, (iii) Flexibility, (iv) Training, (v) Managerial support, (vi) Communica tion and cooperation, (vii) Feedback and reward, (viii) Leadership, (ix) Information sharing and (x) Process improvement orientation) . The framework has been used to analyze the performance of teams based upon the above dimensions which helps in improving the performance. Various pe rformance metrics i.e. Sigma level (within) and sigma (overall), yield, Cp and Cpk have been calculated to find out the scope for improvement with re spect to SCM dimensions based upon team characteristics.

5

Authors: Runsheng Tu

J. M. Juran's subjective quality de finition of "quality is degree to which a set of inherent characteristic s fulfils requirements" and the account have five big inherent problems: "to disturb the language order", "to violate the objective of the standardized work", "the dependence to the subjective being too strong, to disobey the objectiv ity principle", "to be short of the enthusiastic limit", "to be possible to reduce the requirement through the reduction, to improve the quality", "to be possible provides the reason theoretically for the fake and shoddy manufacturer and the person whose quality is bad", "to have the suspicion of circular definition". The method to treat the wound is establishing the definition of "quality is the positive degree". This definition of qua lity both has guaranteed the positive connotation of J. M. Juran's quality de finition and has cured the flaws of J. M. Juran's quality definition, but also has promulgated the condition of the symmetry and the connection between quality and value.

7

Authors: Laila El Abbadi, Aboubakr Bouayad, Mohamed Lamrini

Quality as a new requirement for th e field of higher education leads institutions to seek to satisfy generi c or specific quality standards imposed directly or indirectly by its customers. The aim of this study is to compare between ISO9001, as a generic quality standard, and the Code of Practice of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), as a specific quality standard. A correlation matrix is drawn and correlation rates are calculated to show similarities and differences between them. This paper shows, first, that ISO9001 and QAA Code of Practice are compatible. Second, implementing a quality management sy stem in accordance with ISO9001 requirements can constitute an adequate framework for the application of the QAA Code of Practice requirements. Third, to make the ISO9001 requirements closer to a specific qua lity standard in the field of higher education, it is recommended to co mplete these standards by specific requirements to the field of higher education.

10

Authors: Piet J.H. Daas, Saskia J.L. Ossen

Quite some researchers use data sources collected by others for their own investigations. Because of this choice, the research becomes highly dependent on the quality of the secondary data sources used. Therefore, it is important that, prior to use, one is able to check the quality of secondary data sources in a system atic and standardized way. This paper describes the development of a procedure for the evaluation of the quality of the metadata of secondary sources. In it two different views on metadata quality are distinguished. The first view focuses on quality aspects essential for the delivery of the source, wher eas the second view predominantly focuses on the conceptual metadata asp ects. The quality is determined with a checklist. The approach, originally developed for secondary data sources used for statistics, is applicable to a ll areas of research that make use of secondary data sources.

13

Authors: Golam Kabir, M. Ahsan Akhtar Hasin

The performance of the ready-m ade garment (RMG) industry has been one of the most notable success stories of the Bangladesh economy over two decades. To meet the growing de mand of synthetic yarns, Bangladesh has to import it from fo reign countries which cost a substantial amount of foreign currency for the country. It is a pressing need for local manufacturers to come forward, produce quality synthetic yarn and fulfill the demand of the local market. The purpose of this paper is to present a Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (FQFD) model to indentify customer requirements and also demonstrate how these requirements can be used to prioritize the design requirements for m anufacturing of synthetic yarns. In this system, Fuzzy set theory is inte grated into house of quality (HOQ) to overcome the shortcomings of th e traditional QFD and to capture the inherent impreciseness and vaguene ss of customer requirements and facilitate to prioritize QFD informa tion. Improving high priority design requirements will ultimately increase cu stomer satisfaction and as a result customer perceived quality will soar.

14

Authors: Sanjit Ray, Prasun Das

Six-Sigma is an improvement strategy for achieving customer satisfaction by reducing variation and thus producing products and services better, faster and cheaper. This study presents a Six-Sigma project of an automotive plant illustrating how the DMAIC methodology and statistical techniques were applied to resolve the issue of manufacturing process capability. This project has substantially benefit ted the organization by reducing the variation of bore size of cr ank case, achieving zero rejection and improving the on time delivery. By using appropriate qualitative and quantitative tools in different phases of the DMAIC methodology, the critical output, key process inputs and root c auses were ident ified, analyzed and validated. This project methodology can be used in general to reduce process variation for any other manufacturing pr ocesses as well, which will help in improving customer satisfaction.

5

Authors: Milos Jelic, Vladimir Trajkovic

Annual competition for national award for business excellence appears to be a good opportunity for participating organizations to demonstrate their practices particularly those ones which enable them to excel. National quality award competition in Serbia (and Montenegro), namely "OSKAR KVALITETA" started in 1995 but was limited to competition cycle only. However, upon establishing Fund for Quality Culture and Excellence - FQCE in 2002, which took over OSKAR KVALITETA model, several changes took place. OSKAR KVALITETA turned to be annual competition in business excellence, but at the same time FQCE started to offer much wider portfolio of its services including levels of excellence programs, assessment and self-assessment training courses and benchmarking workshops. These benchmarking events have hosted by Award winners or other laureates in OSKAR KVALITETA competition who demonstrated excellence in regard of some particular criteria thus being in position to share their practice with other organizations. For six years experience in organizing benchmarking workshops FQCE scored 31 workshops covering major part of model issues. Increasing level of participation on the workshops and distinct positive trends of participants expressed satisfaction may serve as a reliable indicator that the workshops have been effective in actuating people to think and move in business excellence direction.

7

Authors: Janko D. Jovanovic

Since 1960, Taguchi methods have been used for improving the quality of Japanese products with great success. Basic assumption of Taguchi's design for six sigma or robust design is that quality must be designed into a product from the start at both the product and process design stage in order to improve product reliability and manufacturability. This paper deals with case study of product design based on Taguchi's approach that involves parametric optimization of piston rod geometry aiming mass reduction with stress restriction. Finite element analysis software ANSYS Workbench was used to get access to CAD parameters of piston rod within a process of parametric finite element evaluation and optimization.

8

Authors: Zora Arsovski, Slavko Arsovski, Aleksandar Aleksic, Miladin Stefanovic, Sonja Grubor

Business environment today demands high reliable organizations in every segment to be competitive on the global market. Beside that, ICT sector is becoming irreplaceable in many fields of business, from the communication to the complex systems for process control and production. To fulfill those requirements and to develop further, many organizations worldwide are implementing business paradigm called - organizations resilience. Although resilience is well known term in many science fields, it is not well studied due to its complex nature. This paper is dealing with developing the new model for assessment and quantification of ICT dependable organizations resilience.

4

Authors: Bulent Eker

Metalized coating is attained by atomizing the coating metal by melting with proper gas (propane, acetylene or others) and oxygen compound and then spraying it with compressed air all over the surface to be coated. Metallization in the application is the process of vaporization of the needed metal with tungsten in vacuumed media. This system among the PVD Coating groups is known as Evaporation Coating all through the world. Although the very fine metal layer that condenses over the product to be coated varies from sector to sector; it is generally used with aesthetic and decorative aims. The surface of the part to be coated is cleaned off the effects such as dirt, dust and oils etc. this cleaning method varies according to the size, shape and material of the piece to be coated. Surface cleaning before coating is very important in the sense of coating life, quality and strength. Otherwise, expected yield cannot be attained from the metalized and corrosion start can be observed shortly due to remnants on the places which are not thoroughly cleaned. Since metallization is a vaporization method; it is ionized by melting on all places which are in high-vacuumed. But there occurs an adsorption problem on some plastic types, therefore a smooth coating is attained applying an adherence through interlayer on these products before coating or with corona application. In food packaging sector metalized coated products are used because of their barrier feature towards light, water vapor, oxygen and other gases. This method of packaging is widely used in such kinds of sectors due to being most economical in packaging sector. For example; food packaging sector which holds a great place in flexible packaging group uses metalized coating system due to their barrier feature of metalized film with the aim of preventing oxidation of food products, decreasing the need of protective addition agent and extending the shell-life. Moreover cosmetic packaging group and many other sectors uses metalized coating due to its aesthetic feature with the aim of its being supportive to product promotion and reveal the decorative feature of the product. Metalized coating firms generally have quality and coating problems. In metalized coating processes done in series; expected amount and quality can not be attained generally. Therefore in this paper; how the quality is attained in metalized coating applications and the effective factors for this application will be explained.

7

Authors: Aleksandar Maric, Slavko Arsovski

The original definition of consumption (from Latin "consumer") that is closely related to the notion of consumer, related to the taking of food- consuming. This paper describes an original methodology of measuring customer satisfaction bakery products (bread and pastries) as well as the quality objectives of the organization. By comparing the size of the level of satisfaction obtained by this method of measuring the ACSI index, as one of najprimenjevanijih way to measure customer satisfaction with quality of products / services determisane quality reserves in both cases.

7

Authors: Tatjana Stanovcic, Djurdjica Perovic, Ilija Moric, Sanja Pekovic

In this paper we investigate the indirect effect of ISO 9000 adoption on employees' wage. Actually, the adoption of quality standards induces firm's re-organization, underlying improvement of work environment and employees' involvement. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze how work environment and employees' involvement are associated with employees' wage. Our empirical results based on Montenegrin employee database from two quality certified firms indicate that better work environment has no influence on employees' wage while employee involvement is positively associated with higher wages.

8

Authors: Milan Eric, Vladimir Nedic, Miladin Stefanovic, Marko Djukic

One of the basis of a series of standards JUS ISO 9000 is quality system documentation. An architecture of the quality system documentation depends on the complexity of business system. An establishment of an efficient management documentation of system of quality is of a great importance for the business system, as well as in the phase of introducing the quality system and in further stages of its improvement. The study describes the architecture and capability of software solutions to support and manage the quality system documentation in accordance with the requirements of standards ISO 9001:2001, ISO 14001:2005 HACCP etc.

6

Authors: Danijela Tadic, Milan Eric, Dragan Milovanovic, Miladin Stefanovic

This paper develops multirelational data base for major depression costs. It lists how data are collected and stored into the fact base and dimension base. Uncertain data is described linguistically and modelled by fuzzy sets. Linguistic expressions are stored in dimension base. Models of major depression treatment costs are developed for each patient and all population. On the basis of this model and multirelational data base MD-OLAP a model for major depression treatment costs is developed.

6

Authors: Milena Tadic, Goran Sekulic, Stanka Filipovic

Lake Skadar is located on the Yugoslav-Albanian border. The lake is the largest at the Balkan and has a surface area which fluctuates seasonally from 370 to 600 km2. Although its precise origin is unknown, the lake probably for med during the Tertiary and/or Quaternary periods by dissolution of limestone in an active tectonic basin. The present day lake, a subtropical body of water lying 5 m above sea level, has a 5490 km2 drainage basin. The area of Skadar Lake basin and the lake itself, with all their specific features, was and still is a challenge for various researchers. However, in spite of all that, the water status of the Skadar Lake has not been defined in the light of "EU Guideline for water".Regarding it, in this work are emphasized the basic aims of aforementioned guideline, with retrospective view on their practical implementation. The available database of the current monitoring of the Skadar lake waters is shown in this work in order to distinguish the necessity for operative monitoring in the direct lake basin and research monitoring of the Skadar Lake waters, according to defined elements.The processed data show the impact of pollution sources in the basin (waste waters in the settlements and industries, where the Aluminium plant in Podgorica is dominant and uncontrolled usage of fertilizers) on Skadar Lake waters quality, but it is not still enough to define the Skadar lake waters status according to elements from the Guideline.

10

Authors: Slavko Arsovski, Zora Arsovski, Pol Andre, Miladin Stefanovic

In today's business conditions, organizations worldwide operate with the transactions executed and communications received immediately after they are initiated. Tolerance in every aspect is shrinking and many organizations are outsourcing dependable. Disruption in business has widened, it includes traditional natural disaster and any event that disturbs this fast-paced operational flow - from an acquisition or organization growth to a new government regulation or to a scheduled system upgrade. This resulted in a new business paradigm organizational resilience. Impact of Information Systems (IS) on organizational resilience is through: (1) higher level of knowledge and transparency of business processes, (2) higher level of flexibility, agility and sustainability of organization, (3) enhancement of key competiveness forces, (4) enhancements of awareness about business risks and vulnerability of organizations, (5) enhancement of speed of organization recovery, (6) enhancement of organizational culture and awareness about resilience and (7) supporting the organization sustainability. Each possible impact of IS varies and depends upon two sides and their relations: (1) characteristics of IS which is related to ICT characteristics and (2) characteristics of organization. Because that, authors contribution in this paper is to make clear different approaches to IS - and organizational resilience and establish the model for simulation of this impact. This model is evaluated on an example and presented as a case study.

12

Authors: Milos Mihajlovic

This paper has identified a research gap to study how organizations collaborate together to adopt Inter- Organizational System (IOS) for Supply Chain Management (SCM). We propose such a framework and then use four theories, namely resource dependency theory, organizational theory, actor-network theory and negotiated order theory, to understand how the framework supports management collaboration and interaction in the adoption of an IOS. This adoption framework is proposed to better study how senior management staff, from both supplier and customer perspectives, collaborate and interact in the IOS adoption process. The framework has been constructed from the literature identifying six major aspects for consideration namely: inter and intra organizational collaboration; strategic management approaches; supply chain design (SCD); business process redesign/reengineering (BPR); information systems (IS) / information technology (IT) architecture and external environmental factors. From customer and supplier perspectives the adoption of IOS for SCM, makes a significant contribution to knowledge in this field.