The impact of national and international quality awards on total quality management

International and National Awards
Abstract
Management literature, marketing strategies or corporate policies apply the word “quality“ so frequently, as if nobody had doubt about the meaning of this term. The approach of one’s side about the quality of service must not be the same as the approach of any other side. That are the reasons for which is the quality assessment such subjective and an understanding of the basic concepts such controversial. In the past 10 or 20 years, a few companies have radically transformed their business performance. Many of the concepts and methods they have used are now collectively called “total quality” or “total quality management”, what according to Juran include business transformation, performance excellence, business excellence and six sigma. We should mention here, that in any discussion of total quality it is useful to understand the generic term “total quality management” as “the vast collection of philosophies, concepts, methods and tools, which are now being used throughout the world to manage quality”, but at its core it’s a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. Various people, various opinions. Such approach is possible by definition and understanding of the terms “quality” and “total quality management” too.
One of the most useful trends in the past decade has been the self-assessment activities of many companies throughout the world. Companies worldwide are using the criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the European Quality Award, the Deming Prize and many other national quality awards (Ludwig Erhard Preis in Germany, Národná cena za kvalitu SR in Slovakia and so on) to assess their current performance against a reasonable set of guidelines for total quality. A very import step in this process is to first understand one’s own organisation’s performance level and compare it to the performance level of another organisation. The paper describes the fundamental problem, also the impact of national and international quality awards on total quality management.
Keywords: quality, management, Total quality management, success, awards

• Introduction to the Total Quality Management

In the past two decades, many organisations throughout the world have been under tremendous pressure. In global competitive markets, quality has become the most important single factor for success and during these years there has been an increasing global emphasis on quality management. Many companies have found that all their radical restructuring, reengineering, downsizing and numerous quality programs may have helped them survive, but they still do not have a distinctive quality advantage. Reimann, then Director for Quality Programs, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, in testimony to the U.S. Congress, stated this clearly [2]: “There is now far clearer perception that quality is central to company competitiveness and to national competitiveness.” In others’ words, quality management has become the competitive issue for many organisations and according to J. M. Juran: “Just as the twentieth century was the century of productivity, the twenty-first century will be the quality century”. Nevertheless, what is quality and what means the “generic” term “total quality management”?
Wadsworth, Stephens and Godfrey explained the term “quality” in their publication Modern Methods for Quality Control and Improvement, as follows [3]: “For starters turn to an available dictionary and read the definition of quality. It probably includes some of the following in its definition:

• degree of excellence, or general excellence (. . . has quality),
• attribute of faculty (. . . has many good qualities),

- relative nature, character, or property.“
Shewhart argues that quality is often best described as “qualities”, that it is quantifiable, from this perspective, but that there is both an objective and a subjective side to quality.
The International Standards Organisation (ISO) defines quality as: “Quality: degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements, with the following notes:
Note 1: The term “quality” can be used with adjectives such as poor, good, or excellent. Note 2: “Inherent” means existing in something, especially as a permanent characteristic.
In further clarification of this definition, “requirement” is defined as: need or expectation that is stated,