Quality management and improvement: A framework and a business-process reference model

This paper presents a reference model for the process of management of quality and improvement based on a conceptual framework for managing the process of systematically deriving improvement actions from customer expectations and strategic decisions through business processes, and prioritising actions that will most contribute to achievement strategic objectives. After some introductory theoretical background to discuss the need for systematically managing quality and improvement as well as the contribution of mapping business processes, the process reference model is described to a certain extent and detailed by means of activity tree and event-driven process chain (EPC) diagrams. Finally, some considerations are made on the bene®ts of using such an approach. Introduction The rapidly increasing global competition that many industry sectors world wide have been facing over the past decade, associated with rapid technological changes and product variety proliferation have led to a new scenario in which industries, in order to remain competitive, must continuously implement best practice management principles, strategies and technologies. In this sense, many theoretical works have been published emphasising the importance of a strategic management of operations and the management of quality in order to gain competitive advantage. The competitiveness of a company is mostly dependent on its ability to perform well in dimensions such as cost, quality, delivery dependability and speed, innovation and ̄exibility to adapt itself to variations in demand. While alignment of operations with strategic priorities is core to competitiveness, the continuous improvement of operation processes plays a very important complementary role in quest of competitiveness in the long run. Continuous improvement has been de®ned as a company-wide process of focused and continuous incremental innovation (Bessant et al., 1994). It is thus complementary to the more radical change normally considered under the terms re-engineering or change management. The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-7154.htm Business-process reference model