Guest editorial

Citation

Sinha, M. (2013), "Guest editorial", The TQM Journal, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqm.2013.10625daa.001

Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: The TQM Journal, Volume 25, Issue 4.

For the TQM journal, Special Issue (No. 4, Volume 25, 2013) with selected papers from: The Fourth Canadian Quality Congress, held at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 27-29, 2012.

The collection of papers in this special issue of the TQM journal come from the presentations made at the Fourth Annual Canadian Quality Congress that was held on the campus of the Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 27-29, 2012. Dignitaries representing the Prime Minister of Canada, President of the Carleton University and Mayor of the City of Ottawa were in attendance on the opening day.

The theme of the Congress was: Closing the Quality Gap: Manufacturing vs Service Industries. Ten world-class keynote and featured speakers and 45 highly qualified research scholars from 16 countries from around the world including from Canada were the main attractions for attendees during the two-and-a-half day sessions. The papers selected in this special issue cover a wide variety of research topics. You will find all articles worthwhile, excellent and rigorously searched for your take home practical use.

The purpose of the first paper by Bolboli and Reiche is to develop a holistic model for reviewing business excellence (BE) concepts from a systemic perspective and to propose an implementation guideline intending to fill the gap between theory and practice of systems thinking in quality management in order to help organization to achieve the sustainability goals.

A methodology was developed that describes the process of designing and implementing a new sustainable BE model.

The second paper by Kheradia and Warriner closely studies quality practitioners’ perspectives towards meeting and exceeding the new food safety regulatory expectations. The key lessons learnt from the 2008 Listeriosis outbreak in Canada are reviewed. A case study for developing a food safety and quality management system for low-risk situation facilities – i.e. in a third party warehouse, is examined to show potential connections between the sections of the recent Food Safety Modernization Act and the roles of quality practitioners.

Wisdom begins in wonder, Socrates said. Quality managers know the words of wisdom. They have always known that asking question is the most effective way to learn about what went wrong on the production line and what one could have done to prevent it from happening and learn from it to improve in the future. This paper by Jan Myszewski talks us about the logical intricacies of how to ask right questions, since there are dumb questions and there are intelligent questions. You will learn all about it in his paper.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index is a well-established measurement tool. Author Odette Lobato Calleros has used this methodology as an appropriate indicator to compliment the evaluation of government social programs as a means to measure citizen satisfaction and citizen trust. The case in point is a government project of huge proportion going on in Mexico to provide concrete floors in housing development for poor people to sleep on. The method also takes into account the cause and effect data of satisfaction as well as the magnitude of relationships among the considered variables to allow for the identification of areas of opportunity within the program and to monitor them.

The purpose of the next paper by Seema Arif and Maryam Ilyas is to propose a model to understand dynamics of student satisfaction and loyalties in private universities in Pakistan. The model suggests that two leading factors that influence students’ perception of service quality are either related to leadership and effective planning or to overall management style of the actual processes existing currently for service delivery. The research was conducted on data from seven private universities in Pakistan using quantitative survey. Data were analyzed using SPSS programming and exploratory factors technique to identify satisfying and dissatisfying factors under six service quality indicators (teaching, management, leadership, campus life, academic services and infrastructure).

Another paper by Tang Xiaofen describes a project undertaken by the Shanghai Association of Quality to comprehensively understand the current status of the overall level of quality management maturity of the companies and enterprises of all sizes and types in Shanghai, China. The project was planned and designed based on the evaluation criteria of performance excellence model which consisted of developing a maturity index model with indicator system and framing of survey questionnaires and sampling plans. The author concludes that although China has come along way, it still has a long way to go in advancing knowledge building and training. Recommendations are provided for Shanghai enterprises in their quest for improving the level of quality management maturity.

The topic of the next paper is about quality management in public services. The paper by Diane Dalgleish and her team from the provincial government of Alberta, Canada provide examples and case studies showing what's happening in the Capital Projects Division of provincial government. You will appreciate the authors’ research on how the unique challenges to management of civil service organizations were met. They provide ample evidences of management principles from the private sector that are being adapted to government departments (e.g. in strategic planning, to processes redesign, corporate communications and results assessments) along with standardization of public administration practices (related to budgeting, training and policy development). However, a lot remains to be seen how and when a total turn around will become the reality for the entire show in government operation.

The last paper by Dawn Ringrose is an attempt to further improve and achieve higher levels of performance excellence when considering quality award criteria of major significance. The paper focusses on understanding key challenges and the opportunities offered by combining good features taken from all organizational excellence models to help organizations accelerate their processes of improving performance, no matter their size or level of maturity. One of the major limitations of this research study, however, was the limited number of feedback reports available to the author to do the reality check.

Finally, I would like to say few words of my own thanks and gratitude to all our volunteers and members of the conference organization committee of the Canadian Society for Quality who have shared their valuable time, talent, energy and ideas to enrich our collective knowledge while contributing to this endeavor.

Last but not the least, I want to thank Ms Juliet Harrison, the publisher of the TQM journal along with her technical staff at Emerald Publishing Group and Dr Alex Douglas, the editor of this journal, without whose continuing help and guidance it wouldn’t have been possible to finish on time the publication of this special issue.

Looking forward to welcome everyone to the Fifth Canadian Quality Congress taking place on the campus of the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, September 23-25, 2013. Hope to see you all there!

Madhav SinhaGuest EditorCanadian Quality Congress, Winnipeg, Canada

About the guest editor

Madhav Sinha is a major contributor to the theory and practice of quality control and total quality management (TQM) in Canada and known internationally as an expert and a pioneer in the field. He has a varied career experience of 45 years as a research scientist, plant engineer, quality manager, university professor and government administrator. A prolific writer, Dr Sinha has authored, co-authored and edited ten books, including a textbook and over 50 research papers published internationally, some translated into foreign languages. He is the recipient of over 30 medals, honors, awards and testimonials for his outstanding contributions in the field of modern quality management, including the Distinguished Service Gold medal, the highest award accorded by American Society for Quality and its Grant medal (for leadership in developing quality educational programs), Edwards medal (for contributions in application of quality control methodologies), Lancaster medal (for work in the international fraternity of quality), the Leadership Award from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of Manitoba for his pioneering contributions in developing quality control sciences in engineering disciplines. He is listed in the International Who's Who in Quality and International Who's Who in Public Service as an outstanding Canadian making significant contributions to the economy and society's well-being. Dr Sinha is an elected academician of the International Academy for Quality and the Founding President of Canadian Society for Quality. He was recently recognized by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal for his more than three decades of outstanding contributions in the field of total-quality management and for spearheading many unique initiatives to promote and elevate the quality profession in Canada and contributing to build its caring society through his excellent services and achievements. Madhav Sinha can be contacted at: madhavsinha2@shaw.ca