The support of Quality Management to sustainable development: a literature review

Abstract

a b s t r a c tQuality Management is considered to be suitable as support for the integration of sustainability considerations in areas such as product development. The purpose of this paper is to review research in which Quality Management methods, tools or practices have been used in conjunction with sustainable development initiatives. We have identified four themes that synthesize the research on Quality Management and its support to approaches for sustainable development: (I) supporting sustainability through integration of management systems, (II) Quality Management as support to the implementation of Environmental Management Systems and to the management of sustainability, (III) supporting integration of sustainability considerations in daily work, and (IV) supporting stakeholder management and customer focus. By far the most research has been conducted within the first two themes. This paper also contributes with proposals for future research, such as the need to move beyond existing standards and management systems to enable more radical improvements, and the need for empirical evidence of the effect of integrated management systems on environmental performance. We also highlight the point that Quality Management practices and tools must be developed and adapted in order to support sustainability considerations.

Sustainability, TQM and Value Co-Creation Processes: The Role of Critical Success Factors

“…Moreover, the literature review on CSFs performed in this study highlighted the common traits among different managerial approaches, the analysis of which has not yet been completely performed and which can also represent a future step of this research. On this point, it is worth remembering that a recent study invites us to focus on "Quality Management practices and tools [that] must be developed and adapted in order to support sustainability considerations" [118] (p. 1); this paper also welcomes this suggestion, contributing to the TQM literature, without forgetting about the strategic perspective proposed by the value co-creation approach.…”

Contribution of Quality Management Practices to Sustainability Performance of Vietnamese Firms

“…Adopted process-based management methodology from TQM and GRI-guidelines for SD, a process model was proposed to describe the triple bottom line in which quality indicators were proposed to add to the economic dimension. A majority of papers regarding QM and three components of SP are conceptual studies to propose descriptive insight, model, proposition, framework, and ideas [48].…”

Impact of Implementation of Total Quality Management: An Assessment of the Saudi Industry

“…Using quality management (QM) practices correctly, industrial companies can assure their success to achieve competitiveness [1]. As improvement strategies to meet customer satisfaction and business excellence, QM initiatives have been used in conjunction with sustainable development initiatives [2], [3]. Therefore, most companies take advantage of total quality management (TQM) practices such as statistical process control and their modern approaches such as Six Sigma, Lean, and agile thinking to produce a better performance [4], [5].…”

“…For such approaches, much research has investigated the readiness of people and organisations to implement and take advantage of these 98 QM approaches in different countries [6]- [9]. Although QM and its modern practices are increasingly adopted by large numbers of industrial companies worldwide [3], in many regions -such as the Middle East -they are only slowly being adopted [10], [11]. As an indicator to measure the extent of QM practices being used in the Middle East, Figure 1 shows the level and trend of QM in Saudi Arabia along with some peer countries, based on the number of ISO 9001 certificates obtained up to 2015.…”