Organizational Excellence through Quality Governance

1. Introduction In today's highly competitive global economy, the demand for high quality products manufactured at low costs with shorter cycle times has forced a number of manufacturing industries to consider various new product design, manufacturing, and management strategies. Recently, due to the rapid advances in Information Technology (IT), new paradigms have successively emerged such as e-commerce, automation of business processes to process orders with internet via Enterprise Portals. To cover these new requirements methods like Concurrent Engineering, Business Process Engineering, TQM and more Enterprise Engineering (EE) are needed (Jochem, 1999). A new paradigm in this area of management strategies is SIX SIGMA. The main goal of SIX SIGMA is to optimize the performance of processes. Other indicators which influence the quality of products and processes are customer orientation, cultural issues, adequate organization of work, quality of leadership, Policy Deployment (Akao, 2004). These indicators have to be covered, when we deal with the determination of adequate and reasonable criteria for the assessment and measurement of the " Quality of an Enterprise " and for the operation of enterprises in an adequate and reasonable manner. These both together are then called " Quality Governance " .