This article records the empirical research that investigates the reasons behind, practices and effects of ISO 9000 certification and Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation in small and medium-sized (SME) and large manufacturing companies. The research is based on a survey of 180 Norwegian manufacturing companies. The main findings are (1) the SMEs implement ISO 9000 standards and TQM ma...

This paper develops and tests several hypotheses relating to ISO 9000 quality system certification process using data collected in a cross-sectional study undertaken in Australia. Multivariate analysis is used to analyse the quantitative data and test the hypotheses. Our findings show that there is a significant and positive relationship between the manager's motives for adopting ISO 9000 certi...

Many companies invest great efforts into achieving appropriate organization and through it better quality of products and services. They try to achieve this in a systematic way following the standard iso 9000. Implementing iso is a management decision that requires consideration of company’s operations, strategy, staff and, most importantly, customers. The theoretical part of the research is fo...

T 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 performa...

ISO 9000:2000 is the latest version of the quality standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The standard aims to evaluate a firm’s ability to effectively design, produce, and deliver quality products and services. This version of the standard tries to enhance customer satisfaction by including more top-management involvement and continual improvement. Desp...

Background: Radical cystectomy is associated with perioperative complication rates exceeding 50% in some series. Readmission rates are increasingly used as a surgical quality metric. White blood cell count is a crude surrogate for physiologic processes which may reflect postoperative complications leading to readmission. Objective: We assessed the association between final white blood cell coun...

BACKGROUND To assess the pharmacokinetic profile and time-course of trough concentrations and hemoglobin levels associated with subcutaneous weekly administration of epoetin beta in lung cancer patients with chemotherapy-induced anemia. METHODS Epoetin beta was subcutaneously administered to 15 anemic lung cancer patients once weekly for 8 weeks at doses of 9000, 18,000 and 36,000 IU. Pharmac...

Attention to processes has increased, as thousands of organizations have adopted process-focused programs such as TQM and ISO 9000. Proponents of such programs stress the promise of improved efficiency and profitability. But research has not consistently borne out these prospects. Moreover, the expectation of universal benefits is not consistent with research highlighting the important role of ...

The ISO 9000 experiences of the same sample of organisations over a five year time period is examined in this paper. The responses to a questionnaire sent out at the end of 1999 to companies which had a reasonably long term experience with the ISO 9000 series quality system are analysed. These companies were ISO 9000 series certified before 1994 when the authors conducted their first survey on ...