Investigation on Quality Conformance: A Case Study on Electrical and Electronic SME Industries in Malaysia

This study is conducted on small and medium size electrical and electronic industries in Malaysia to comprehensively testify the impacts of firm's size, ISO certification standards and length of quality management maturity on quality conformance. Seven hypothesizes are generated based on extensive literature review and later examined to serve the purpose of study. Since today's electrical and electronic industries are supposed to have high-tech enterprises, it is sensible to periodically assess them in terms of level of quality management through empirical studies. The data collected from 187 SMEs are intensively analyzed using SPSS 20. The correlations, interaction of factors as well as purpose of quality management implementation, differences and similarities of obstacles are assessed among electrical and electronic industries. It is found that ISO certification standards and adoption of quality maturity practices can affect performance of organizations. There is hardly any study that extensively investigates on the relevant factors that can contribute into conformance level in electrical and electronic industries. There is no study that investigates the differences and similarities between electrical industry and electronic industry in terms of obstacles of implementation. This empirical study has been conducted using online survey methodology. The low to moderate response rate of responses and restricted access to numeric data related to conformance can be considered as limitations of this study.