The contemporary quality management (QM) literature prescribes various quality improvement shategies. However, it lacks scientifically developed and tested constxucts that represent an integrative QM philosophy. Moreover, an impact of the prescribed QM strategies on a fm's product quality has not been analyzed. Through a detailed analysis of the literature, this research identifies 12 constructs of integrated QM strategies. Using a survey of 371 manufacturing firms, the c o n s t~~t s 8ce then empirically tested and validated. LISREL 7 is used for this purpose. Finally, a framework to examine the effects of integrated QM strategies on a firm's product quality is suggested. Comparisons between this and two other comprehensive scales of TQM are made.
Subject Areas: Quality Management, Scale Development, and TQM Theory.
S d a y L.Ahire is an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Western Michigan University. He received a Ph.D. in management science from the University of Alabama in 1992. He also holds a master's degree in management studies and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, both from the University of Bombay. Dr. Ahire's current research interests include evaluation of quality management strategies, and interfaces between quality management and operations decision models. His research has been published or accepted for publication in
Peptidases, their substrates and inhibitors are of great relevance to biology, medicine and biotechnology. The MEROPS database (http://merops.sanger.ac.uk) aims to fulfill the need for an integrated source of information about these. The database has hierarchical classifications in which homologous sets of peptidases and protein inhibitors are grouped into protein species, which are grouped into families, which are in turn grouped into clans. Recent developments include the following. A community annotation project has been instigated in which acknowledged experts are invited to contribute summaries for peptidases. Software has been written to provide an Internet-based data entry form. Contributors are acknowledged on the relevant web page. A new display showing the intron/exon structures of eukaryote peptidase genes and the phasing of the junctions has been implemented. It is now possible to filter the list of peptidases from a completely sequenced bacterial genome for a particular strain of the organism. The MEROPS filing pipeline has been altered to circumvent the restrictions imposed on non-interactive blastp searches, and a HMMER search using specially generated alignments to maximize the distribution of organisms returned in the search results has been added.
We illuminate the myriad of opportunities for research where supply chain management (SCM) intersects with data science, predictive analytics, and big data, collectively referred to as DPB. We show that these terms are not only becoming popular but are also relevant to supply chain research and education. Data science requires both domain knowledge and a broad set of quantitative skills, but there is a dearth of literature on the topic and many questions. We call for research on skills that are needed by SCM data scientists and discuss how such skills and domain knowledge affect the effectiveness of an SCM data scientist. Such knowledge is crucial to develop future supply chain leaders. We propose definitions of data science and predictive analytics as applied to SCM. We examine possible applications of DPB in practice and provide examples of research questions from these applications, as well as examples of research questions employing DPB that stem from management theories. Finally, we propose specific steps interested researchers can take to respond to our call for research on the intersection of SCM and DPB.
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