Assessment and improvement of quality management capabilities for manufacturing industries in Australia

This paper provides an assessment of the quality management capabilities of the manufacturing industries in the Western Sydney Region of New South Wales, Australia based on a conceptual framework of the Quality Management Assessment Framework (QMAF) model which incorporates Information Communication Technology as an enabler. Survey data collected from a range of small, medium and large manufacturing organisations were used in this assessment. The results established the general reliability of the QMAF model and provided comprehensive profile of the quality management capabilities, highlighting deficiencies in industries in the Western Sydney Region. The main limitation of this research was the small sample size, even after conducting follow-up mail outs to the whole population of 1236 organisations. The analysis provides valuable guidelines to the managers of the participating organisations aiming at bettering their business processes in many ways, including benchmarking their performance against the best case scores of the QMAF, a precursor to facilitating the determination of insights which could be used to promote quality improvement programmes.