Quality Management Standards (QMS) Implementation in Egypt: ISO 9000 Perspectives

Introduction The globalization of the marketplace together with the expansion of international trade, and the rapid improvement in high quality products and services has brought about high level of market pressure across the world. In order to become efficient and competitive in today's business environment, the majority of organizations are being encouraged not only to change their old operational habits, but also to develop better ways to ensure that customers are satisfied with the quality of products/services. As many organizations have discovered that the key to customer satisfaction and competitive success lies in emphasizing and achieving product and service quality as a strategic weapon in performing business (Pulat, 1994; Krasachol and Guh, 2000; Lai et al., 2002; Reed et al., 1999). It is clear that quality has emerged as a strategic competitive tool for organizational success (Yong and Wilkinson, 2002). In today's business environment, organizations cannot afford to ignore the strategic implications of quality for its competitive position. In the light of this, various standardized methods, Total Quality Management (TQM) principles and criteria for formation of quality policy, creation of international quality accreditation, notification and quality certification systems were utilized among organizations to achieve quality products/services. In today's business environment, the conformation and application of standardized quality management system models such as ISO 9000 and TQM are vitally considered to be one of the most important phenomena in total quality management development and globalization (Dale et al., 2001; Ruzevicius et al., 2004). TQM and quality management system implementation has had the highest positive impact on the quality improvement (see Figure 1) of companies' operations and products (Adomaitiene and Ruzevicius, 1999). In the light of this, it is vital for organizations to develop or adopt an effective quality management system such as ISO 9000, which combines also the main TQM principles (Rohitratana and Boon-Itt, 2001). ISO 9000 is one of the most influential initiatives that grew from the quality movement of the 1980s (Poksinska et al., 2002), and one of the most frequently company implementated strategies concerning quality across the world (ISO, 2006). Moreover, ISO 9000 has become a subject of focus in many developing countries, including Egypt. The literature review offers many diverse opinions on ISO 9000 in different countries but little empirical research has been carried out in Egypt concerning ISO implementation issues, such as critical success factors of ISO 9000 implementation and the problems associated with the implementation. Therefore, it is important to study some of the issues concerning the implementation of the standard in order to make the ISO 9000 system more effective in quality improvement. This paper aims to assess empirically ISO 9001 implementations in Egypt through the following phases: 1. Identification of the process owner of ISO 9001: 2000 initiations 2. Critical success factors for the transition to ISO 9001: 2000 3. The identification of the critical success factors that contributed to the success of ISO 9001: 2000 implementation 4. To identify the problems associated with ISO 9001: 2000 implementation The results of this study are useful for further improvement of quality management practice and interesting for practitioners and academia who are interested with the current situation of ISO 9000 in Egypt. Research Problem The Egyptian government and the business community have placed a greater emphasis on achieving superior quality in order to compete in both domestic and foreign markets through a quality assurance system. This is vital because more and more European and foreign buyers have become frustrated having to verify the quality of Egyptian goods they purchase, a costly and time consuming process. …