The financial impact of ISO 9000 certification in the United States: an empirical analysis.

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000–3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market benefits, and improved financial performance. We employ event-study methods, matching each certified firm to a control group of one or more noncertified firms in the same industry with similar precertification size and/or return on assets. We find that firms’ decision to seek their first ISO 9000 certification was indeed followed by significant abnormal improvements in financial performance, though the exact timing and magnitude of this effect depend on the specification of the control group. Three years after certification, the certified firms do display strongly significant abnormal performance under all control-group specifications. The degree to which the precise results vary across control-group specifications indicates that event studies should always include extensive sensitivity analysis, for instance matching by size and performance separately and jointly, using both single firms and portfolios as controls.ISO 9000; Quality management; Standards; Financial; Empirical; Event study; Compustat;

Linking Sustainability to Quality Management and Firm Performance

Environmental management practices have evolved significantly over the past two decades. During that time, sustainable operations management practices have purportedly made positive contributions to overall firm performance. This paper develops two conceptual frameworks regarding the relationships among specific elements of environmental management, quality management, and firm performance. We suggest that innovation in quality management mediates the relationship between design for environment and firm performance, and that statistical process control techniques moderate the relationship between environmental management systems and firm performance. We identify future research possibilities, based on these frameworks, to inform scholarly research and practice in environmental management and quality management

Japanese Management Strategies

During the detailed researching work of the Kaizen based management practices of the most advanced Japanese companies, that is the best representatives of the Japanese industry, at certain phases occures the need to have a look of a wider perspective embracing some aspects of the strategies and the external connections of these firms, especially the lean enterprises.The goal of this paper is giving a framework for the detailed researches investigating the Kaizen based activities within the companies with the help of general pictures on the ‘Japanese way’ and on the behaviour of the Japanese companies in the glorious fast growth period and then in the times of the serious crises and stagnation as an adaptation to the globalization process.Japanese company culture, Kaizen management philosophy, lean enterprise, corporate strategy,confrontation strategy, avoiding strategy, organizational learning

Easy Innovation and the Iron Cage: Best Practice, Benchmarking, Ranking, and the Management of Organizational Creativity

The use of what came to be known as best practices, benchmarking, and ranking, which took corporate America by storm in the 1980s as a method for managing innovation, has seeped into government and nonprofit organizations in the intervening years. In fact, as H. George Frederickson demonstrates in this Kettering Foundation occasional paper, these practices have proven to be counterproductive both in the business and the public sector. Frederickson suggests, instead, a more flexible, less directive, model he calls "sustained innovation." He offers abundant evidence that this model is more effective in producing organizational effectiveness

Characteristics of TQM: Evidence from the RIT/USA Today Quality Cup Competition

This paper reports the results of a field study examining the use of TQM at 15 firms. The sample is drawn from winners and finalists of the RIT/USA Today Quality Cup. The authors interviewed 75 employees (5 per firm) including 14 executives, 44 middle managers, and 17 front line workers. The interviews elicited information on the motives for adopting TQM, the role of leadership, the use of monitoring, the use of rhetoric, the extent and type of training, the basis for employee evaluation, compensation, and promotion, the use of teams, reallocation of authority, and the results of the TQM program. We use the data to provide a description of how TQM works in practice, including factors that determine patterns of use across firms. A major result is that team-based problem solving is used about twice as frequently as devolution of authority in our sample. We attribute this result to the higher costs of monitoring and corporate change associated with devolution relative to problem solving.

Getting quality the old-fashioned way : self confirming attributions in the dynamics of process improvement

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56).Supported by the NSF. SBR-9422228Nelson P. Repenning and John D. Sterman