The Role of Quality Management in Strategic Manufacturing Decision Making

There has been little empirical research that determines the position and role of quality management in strategic manufacturing decision making. The Australian wine industry was chosen for this research because it has a major focus on quality in process and product. The research found that quality assurance and control rank as the second most important areas of manufacturing process decision making, after plant and equipment. It also found that quality is the most important competitive priority for wine producers, followed by product cost. Quality, plant and equipment and product cost were found to be strongly related and together formed the basis for domestic and international competition in this industry. An ANOVA was used to determine that there were no significant differences in the importance of quality for different organisational characteristics (P