Quality Management: How do Brazilian Companies Use it?

AbstractFor more than 30 years, Total Quality Management (TQM) has been recognized as strategic for organizations worldwide. However, a significant number of Quality Management (QM) initiatives have still not been successful. Some authors argue that this number can achieve more than 60% of the implemented cases. This paper aims at describing how Brazilian Companies use Quality Management Practices. By conducting a survey with 125 respondents, the current status of Quality Management Practices utilization in Brazil was investigated. The analysis of QM practices reveals that companies prefer the usage and give more importance to soft practices such as teamwork and customer focus. On the other hand, companies give less importance to and do not use hard practices such as Analysis of Variance and Six Sigma. According to the respondents, Brazilian companies are at a middle stage of QM maturity level: more than 30% attest that their companies are at “inspection” age and less than 20% state that their companies have achieved strategic quality management. This unsatisfactory level of QM maturity can mean that Brazilian companies manage quality with more focus on inspection and control than quality assurance and strategic management. Therefore “improvement” in this context can mean bringing the operation back to the standard than indeed improving the standard. Finally, future research derived from these findings could investigate how QM practices would be effectively used and help companies to achieve higher QM maturity levels and strategic quality management