Management quality and performance in excellent manufacturing firms

Good management has generally been recognized as necessary for achieving a competitive position in the manufacturing sector. For a successful firm, whose profits come primarily from the commercialization of its ideas and innovations, the organizational performance has been adjusted by giving more importance to customer satisfaction and business results, not just to quality efforts. The resource-based perspective notes that firms are not homogeneous, that they have very distinct individual characteristics and resources, such as facilities, people and tacit knowledge. We studied 29 excellent manufacturing firms that had obtained the National Quality Award, the best-known and most comprehensive award in Taiwan. The result of this study shows that the key successful factors (KSFs) for these firms include the following 9 items: the alignment among mission, strategy and measures, good implementation of MBO system, the completeness of internal information system, the investment of labor training, good communication channel, the enforcement of ISO standard, good control of quality for materials input, higher customer satisfaction and using outside consultants to improve organizational performance. We also analyzed the management quality and performance indicators for these excellent manufacturers. According to the result of this study, quality experts seems to pay more attention to the management quality than the product quality system in the process of selecting excellent firms for the National Quality Award.