title: Resource Allocation for Strategic Quality Management : A Goal Programming Approach
Creators: name: Alidrisi, Hisham Mostafa
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2010
Subjects: subject: management
subject: strategies
subject: resources
subject: goal programming

description: The main aim of this thesis is to assist organizations in understanding the nature of quality management from a resource-based perspective by investigating the relationship between strategies needed to drive quality enhancement, and resources being allocated to support effective strategy implementation. To achieve this research aim, the thesis employs both quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques to give insight into how quality management strategies and resources interact. The thesis argues that organizations may veer away from their quality management implementation plans because of an inherent mismatch between the needed and allocated resources to support strategy implementation. Therefore, a secondary aim of this thesis is to develop a methodology whereby an organization can: 1) determine how their resources are being allocated to support different quality enhancement strategies, and 2) identify any resource discrepancy between what is needed by a certain strategy, and what is being allocated to it. For any organization, whether small or large, manufacturing or service, Total Quality Management (TQM) is a recognized source of competitive advantage to sustain the organization’s position against its competitors. Benefits of applying TQM have been reported by various industries; in particular, the food-processing industry where quality is a major strategic issue. Food-processing organizations recognize that higher quality leads to better product reputation, increased market share and higher profits. They also operate under strict regulatory requirements, and therefore, adopt formal and disciplined approaches to quality management. Consequently, and keeping the above research aims in mind, this thesis adopts an organizational case study approach to explore quality management resource-strategy interactions, and related resource distribution challenges confronting Quality Departments in two of the largest food-processing organizations in Saudi Arabia. Two broad sets of elements are fundamental to the success of TQM: soft elements (e.g. management commitment, employment empowerment, etc.) and hard elements (e.g. control processes, technology utilization, etc.). Although the literature does not clearly demonstrate which set of elements is more significantly related to business and organizational performance, all TQM elements can be viewed as human, organizational, and technological resources. It is this resource-based view of TQM elements that led this thesis to deal with quality management from a strategic viewpoint, or what is known as Strategic Quality Management (SQM). Critical review of the SQM literature identified eight strategies as drivers of quality enhancement. These strategies include the continuous: 1) use of human knowledge, 2) control of quality costs, 3) check of failures, 4) transfer of customer feedback, 5) approach towards targets, 6) management of quality information, 7) management of the quality system itself, and 8) the periodical quality appraisal (i.e. auditing). The review also highlighted a lack of theoretical framework or empirical model to examine the various levels of contribution of each strategy towards quality enhancement, or to guide the process of resource allocation among those eight strategies. To bridge these identified research gaps, the thesis adopts a two-phase research methodology. In the first phase, the thesis handles the issue of resource allocation from the perspective of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) as two MCDM techniques, namely Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Goal Programming (GP), are employed. In the first step of the first phase, a conceptual framework comprising three clusters (resources, strategies, and ability to enhance quality) has been developed in the form of a multi-criteria decision problem where the ANP was employed to model resource-dependence and resource-strategy interactions. This phase required the development and distribution of a questionnaire targeting managers who worked in the Quality Departments for the two selected organizations. The managers were asked to compare a pair of elements (e.g. resources or strategies) at a time with respect to a control criterion (e.g. supporting a certain strategy or enhancing overall quality). Evaluating the dependence and feedback, among and within the framework clusters, provided a systematic and objective way of deriving the weights to be used for prioritizing strategies (in terms of their individual contribution towards quality enhancement), and determining the relative levels of resource influence on each other, and on strategy implementation. Moreover, this phase identified resource-allocation discrepancies between what each strategy needs and what it actually receives from available resources. The second step of the first phase of the research utilized the output of the ANP analysis as input for a Goal Programming (GP) model to identify to what extent each strategy is under- or over-resourced. The model results indicated that both organizations, despite having different strategy priorities, need to re-allocate their resources to better support their quality enhancement strategies. The model results revealed interesting observations. For instance, one company ranked the strategy of controlling quality costs as having the least ability to enhance overall quality; however, this particular strategy was then found to be over-resourced by as much as 70%. Similarly, in the second company, the strategy of check of failures is the most over-resourced (16.8%), even though it is priority 6 in terms of resources that should be allocated for the eight strategies. In the second phase of the research, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 managers working for the two organizations. For each organization, the interviews ascertained how individual quality, supply chain or information technology managers manage, evaluate, and report the progress of strategy implementation. The interviews’ findings not only shed some light on quality management practices, and resource availability and allocation, but were also used to see if the quantitative output resulting from the developed hybrid ANP-GP methodology would be corroborated. There are two main contributions made by this thesis: 1) contribution to the existing body of knowledge on quality management through the development of a conceptual framework that explicitly captures the interactions among, and within, quality management resources and strategies, and 2) contribution to current industry practice through the provision of a methodology whereby organizations would identify resource-strategy allocation discrepancies, and hence be able to convey a message to senior management of what resource is needed, and to which strategy the identified resource should be allocated, thus improving the overall level of resource utilization. The proposed methodology relies heavily on the expertise, knowledge and experience of managers. As such, it involves subjective assessment of both qualitative and quantitative factors at a particular organization, as well as pertinent industry or country level variables. Consequently, the findings reported herein can only be analytically generalized in the context of large organizations operating in the Saudi food-processing industry. Nevertheless, the proposed methodology is generic in nature and could be replicated to provide a deliberate and structured approach to resource utilization in the context of implementing quality enhancement strategies.