Walid Zaramdini
United Arab Emirates University, College of Business and Economics, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
Download article
Published in: 10th QMOD Conference. Quality Management and Organiqatinal Development. Our Dreams of Excellence; 18-20 June; 2007 in Helsingborg; Sweden
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 26:10, p.
Published: 2008-02-15
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Different non-profit organizations have participated in spreading the knowledge of certain business or engineering disciplines. The quality management field is not an exception but it is characterized by a high number of associations which serve the community of researchers and practitioners. These associations; which can be labeled as Quality Promoting Organizations (QPOs) create an environment of knowledge exchange and organize different intellectual and social activities like seminars; workshops and conferences where their members can participate and learn from each other. These QPOs are generally not-for-profit organizations which have the following objectives:
Quality awareness
Education; training and certification
Quality standards activities (Accreditation)
Quality awards management
It would be interesting to benchmark the activities of certain QPOs in order to determine the “best-in-class” organization. A conceptual model can be determined from the benchmarking process which will serve certain developing countries in establishing their national QPO. In this paper we focused our study on the following organizations:
American Society for Quality (ASQ) (http://www.asq.org).
Japanese Union for Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) (http://www.juse.org.jp)
European Organization for Quality (EOQ) (http://www.eoq.org)
The previously mentioned QPOs were established in the fifties and are still active today. They are renowned as global promoters for quality theory and practice. However this is just a preliminary list which can be extended in future research. The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows:
First; in section 2; we provide a literature review on the subject. In section 3; we present a comparative study of ASQ; JUSE and EOQ from the viewpoint of: mission; objectives; structure and services. We derive in section 4 a conceptual model of a “quality-promoting organization”. Finally we summarize in section 5.
