International Journal for Quality Research

14

Authors: Ilhame Hakmaoui, Abdellatif Loukili

During these last few years, researchers focus more and more on global performance management, as businesses should own more sophisticated systems that will enable them manage their global performance. Many studies have been led to establish an "overview" of the practices adopted by companies. In Morocco, these practices are still unknown. Thus, it would be interesting to investigate these practices at the level of Moroccan SMBs. Through the results of a study that covered 97 Moroccan SMBs, this paper tackles the practices of global performance management and demonstrates that they are diverse by presenting a typology and it aims at explaining how organizational factors influence these practices.

14

Authors: Smiljana Mirkov, Marija Runić Ristić

Quality of life may be analyzed from different perspectives. In compliance with that, it may be assumed that the social position of the profession has significant impact on quality of life. The paper presents the analysis of the research which aim was to examine the three dimensions of the social position of the engineering profession in the society of post-socialist transformation: material status, social power, and social reputation. We compared the results of the current study with the results of the research that we had conducted in the period when socialist relations still exist in organizations. Moreover, we studied how the engineers perceive these three aspects of the social position of their profession. The first research was conducted in 1998 and the second in 2015. 200 engineers were questioned in 146 companies. The results indicate that the dimensions of social position, such as the material standard and the social influence of engineers in Serbia today are a little more favorable than they used to be at the end of the 90s. Finally, a majority of the engineers from our research believe that their expectations regarding the engineering profession have not been fulfilled and in future, their quality of life may be enhanced in terms of social importance and recognition.

16

Authors: Boris Urban, Mainford Toga

Research highlights Quality Management System (QMS) has now become a recognizable guarantee of trust in certified business systems. A critical review of the literature reveals that empirical studies conducted to date have yielded conflicting findings on the relationship between quality management practices and innovation. This study empirically investigates how quality management principles may act as determinants of product and process innovations. The results show that customer focus and leadership explain a significant amount of product innovation, but not process innovation. Empirical support also finds that people management explains a significant amount of variance in both product innovation and process innovation. The findings highlight the importance of developing formal organisational mechanisms to measure levels of such quality determinants as they are easily overlooked or taken for granted. Moreover, firms need to recognise that innovation is a multi-faceted concept that can be controlled from a process or a product perspective, a distinction which is sometimes blurred.

16

Authors: Malefa Rose Malefane, Nicholas Mbaya Odhiambo

Although there is no unanimous consensus on how trade openness affects different economies, the debate around trade openness has received considerable attention in previous studies. In the light of the emerging debates on different aspects of trade openness, this article aims at exploring the dynamics of trade openness in South Africa. Using an exploratory review approach, this article traces the origins of trade openness in South Africa, covering the country's import substitution regime and the export promotion regime. The findings of this study reveal that South Africa has been economically reformed from an inward-oriented import substitution trade regime into a more open, export-oriented trade regime. However, given the current challenge of fluctuating trade openness in South Africa, the country could in the long-term, seek the expansion of its bilateral trade in the sub-Saharan African region. This could be done by making provisions in South Africa's trade policy that aim at deepening regional trade.

18

Authors: Susanta Kumar Gauri, Prasun Das

A public health program (PHP) taken up by the government of a country refers to all organized measures to prevent disease and promote health among the population, by providing different planned cares/services to the people. Usually, the target population for different PHP are different. The basic requirement for success of a PHP is to ensure that all the planned cares/services are reached to each member of the target population. Therefore, the important performance measures for a PHP are the implementation status of all the planned cares/services under the PHP. However, management and monitoring of a PHP become quite difficult by interpreting separately the information contained in a large number of performance measures. Therefore, usually a metric, called composite performance index (CPI), is evaluated to understand the overall performance of a PHP. However, due a scaling operation involved in the CPI computation procedure, the CPI value does not reveal the true overall implementation status of a PHP and consequently, it is effective for management of a PHP. This paper presents a new approach for CPI computation, in which scaling/normalization of the performance variables is not required and therefore, it can be used for monitoring the true overall implementation status of a PHP in a region. A systematic approach for monitoring a PHP using the CPI values is proposed and applied for monitoring the maternal and child healthcare (MCH) program. The results are found effective towards continuous improvement of implementation status.

20

Authors: Filippos Tepaskoualos, Panagiotis Chountalas

Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing trend of organizations implementing simultaneously two or more management systems. The structural similarities of these systems - despite the diversity of their fields of application, such as occupational health and safety for OHSAS 18001, and environmental management for ISO 14001 - have enabled many organizations to integrate different systems into a single one, rather than implementing them separately from one another. The purpose of this paper is to examine in depth a case of integration of the ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 systems, using a construction company as a research setting, in order to draw conclusions about the level of integration achieved, as well as the benefits, the problems, and the critical success factors of this endeavour. The findings of this study show that both the company's devotion to the fulfillment of the critical success factors and the identical structure of the two systems under consideration have facilitated the successful outcome of integration. However, this does not automatically imply that the company adopted the idea of full integration. Instead, the maximization of integration benefits and the elimination of related problems was achieved through the company's conscious choice to proceed with partial integration, keeping separate manuals, policies, and risk management procedures for each system. This study will be useful in order to understand that partial integration is a perfectly acceptable and realistic solution that, under certain circumstances, may even have a better cost-benefit ratio than full integration.

22

Authors: Renata Oczkowska, Sylwia Wisniewska, Pawel Lula

The main goal of the paper is to determine whether there is a gap between the demand for competences of graduates of vocational schools and their supply. The article is composed with several sections. The subsequent parts of the paper contain the essence of competences and the competence gap, general description of the research, assessment of the importance of professional competences in the context of employability of graduates of vocational schools and also assessment of the preparation of graduates of vocational schools in the ?wi?tokrzyskie Voivodeship to start work in their profession. Conclusions and references are placed in the final part of the article.