Continuous Quality Improvement Programs – Part I: Survey, Critical Analysis And Future Research Directions

In practice, the diversity of management philosophies, quality programs, and quality tools has resulted in many quality consulting firms to be established most often offering the same product under a different packaging. This continual repackaging of quality programs for marketing purposes has led to confusion and resulted in organizations often abandoning a specific quality program in favor of another, although programs could be complementary in nature. In an attempt to assist organizations in making informed decisions with respect to the choice of continuous quality improvement programs (CQIPs), we survey and critically analyze the landscape of research on CQIPs, highlight similarities and differences between the underlying quality philosophies, and discuss the limitations of the current generic designs of CQIPs; namely, Just-in-Time (JIT), Benchmarking, Kaizen, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Business Process Reengineering (BPR), and Six Sigma. Our analysis of the literature revealed that, with the exception of Six Sigma, most published design and implementation procedures of CQIPs ignore a problem definition phase, most programs ignore performance measurement and evaluation as a formal phase along with the specification of the relevant criteria according to which performance is to be assessed, most programs lack the explicit integration of auditing, monitoring, control and feedback mechanisms, most published research on quality programs tend either to ignore the explicit integration of quality tools or to refer to a very limited number of potential tools without any guidelines as to which phases they could be used at, most continuous quality improvement programs lack a theoretical grounding in management theories as well as conceptual models, and no published research formally integrates critical success factors into the design methodology of a quality program. In this paper, we attempt to address this last methodological problem by proposing a classification of critical factors of CQIPs that could be used to assist managers in designing and customizing specific programs to their specific environments. In addition, we discuss the potential benefits of hybridization of quality philosophies and programs whereby several quality philosophies, concepts, programs, and tools are coherently integrated into a hybrid CQIP for the purpose of improving quality and reducing waste. Finally, we outline some future research directions.