A quality function deployment approach to internal benchmarking of critical success factors of strategic quality management

This paper presents a methodology to benchmark the quality-related action programmes and critical success factors of Strategic Quality Management (SQM) for manufacturing industries using the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach. The expert committee constituted for this research project identified 27 organisation performance requirements. The required quality-related action programmes to achieve the identified organisation performance requirements were obtained by adopting QFD methodology. Eleven SQM critical success factors were derived by grouping the similar quality-related action programmes. The QFD matrix was constructed with the organisation performance requirements as 'Whats' and the quality-related action programmes as 'Hows'. Finally, the critical success factors and the quality-related action programmes were benchmarked by their corresponding importance weight factors. A case study was presented to illustrate the methodology.