An assessment of the quality management capabilities of the industries in the Western Sydney Region using a Quality Management Assessment Framework (QMAF)

This paper presents a clear methodological path for assessing the quality management systems of organisations with the use of the Quality Management Assessment Framework (QMAF) model. The QMAF specifically incorporates Information Communication Technology (ICT) as an enabler and labels ICT as Information/Knowledge/ Communication (IKC). It introduces the concepts evaluated by the QMAF model and provides an assessment of the quality management capabilities of the industries in the Western Sydney Region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The assessment is based on distribution of scores of the various TQM categories of the QMAF model, using a benchmarking process. This research involved a questionnaire-based survey of small, medium and large manufacturing organisations in the Western Sydney Region. A total of 60 useable questionnaires were received from 300 organisations who received the questionnaire by mail. The management information from the data was treated with the appropriate statistical tools in order to attain secure and minimally biased conclusions. Furthermore, it detected significant differences between large, medium and small organisations and the various ANZSIC industry codes with regard to measures of the TQM categories of the QMAF model using ANOVA. On a theoretical level, the analysis verified the general reliability of the QMAF model. The inspection of the performance of the industries in the Western Sydney Region through the QMAF model assessment has identified many of the region's industries shortcomings that merit further investigation. The results of this analysis can serve as valuable feedback to the managers of the industries considered in this study aiming at bettering their business processes in many ways, including benchmarking their performance against the best case scores of the QMAF, additionally the recursive path analysis study provides vital guidelines in formulating strategies towards achieving business excellence through TQM and can be used to foster continual improvement supported by the QMAF assessment tool.