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For an enterprise striving to implement total quality management (TQM), customer satisfaction (CS) is an important objective to achieve. The success of CS is not only closely related to a company’s TQM performance but it also has permanent effects on the company’s future. However, many corporations still fail to implement CS due to lack of experience, or not being able to keep up with the continuous implementation of CS. This study takes a look at one large Taiwanese multi‐product manufacturing company with nine years of CS implementation experience. The implementation steps developed over nine years of CS implementation would be used as the foundation in building the CS implementation framework so that the possibility of actual performance failure would be minimized.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the level of the importance and implementation of the critical success factors (CSFs) required for the appropriate function of a quality management system (QMS) in ISO 9001:2008-certified companies and the differences between the CSFs and the demographic variables of the companies.

A research project was carried out in Greek companies from all business sectors using the questionnaire technique. The selected companies all implement a QMS in accordance with the ISO 9001:2008 standard. Correspondence analysis, a methodology from the multidimensional statistics field, was also used to identify significant differences between the importance and implementation levels of the CSFs of the QMS.

The importance that quality assurance managers attribute to these CSFs was high enough in most categories, but there was a significant difference in the implementation level, which displayed much lower scores. The most important factors seem to be management commitment, education, and communication, while the least important were the availability of data and use of statistics. Differences between categories of demographic variables were present only for the firm size variable.

The study was based on the perception (i.e. subjective data) of only one quality manager/representative of each company.

The paper provides information to certified companies in Greece on the differences in the importance and implementation levels of quality management practices (especially for hard factors) and motivation to investigate possible causes. Moreover, the most important factors for the successful implementation of ISO 9001 are presented.

This paper describes the implementation and given importance of the CSFs in companies with experience of the ISO 9001:2008 standard and for the analysis of the data a methodology from the multidimensional field is applied, with the complementary use of some special tables of coincidences.

Ever since the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) was established in 1987, many other countries have developed their own version of a national quality award (NQA). These NQAs tend to follow the general framework of the MBNQA with different emphases on criteria items such as leadership, customer focus, resource management and impact on society. This paper is a comparative study of nine major national quality awards (three European, two North American, three Asia Pacific and one South American). It is instructive to note the differences in criteria item emphasis based on a country’s stage of economic development. Multinational companies may find it very useful when their overseas subsidiaries apply for the local NQA following the success of their home companies. Countries that have yet to develop an NQA stand to gain from the comparative information gathered.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.

The aim of this study was to determine whether customer satisfaction can be used as a reliable measure of the performance of the management of a research and development (R&D) department. A study of a research and development department of an Australian manufacturing company was undertaken in 1995. R&D performance and external customer satisfaction were measured using seven dimensions of technical performance and seven dimensions of service quality. Expectations of external customer satisfaction were measured from the internal (staff of R&D department) and external customers’ (production, sales and administration) points of view. This was to highlight the gap between the staffs’ perceptions and the external customers’ perceptions of service provided. The study provides research and development managers with an additional tool for measuring their management performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of customer satisfaction, service quality, the perceived value of services, corporate image and corporate reputation on customer loyalty and their relationship in the Turkish banking industry. Mediation effects of the perceived value and corporate image and reputation are also studied. Understanding the relationships between the determinants of customer loyalty toward the bank helps management to use corporate image and reputation more effectively in its strategy, thus enhancing the institution’s position in the minds of consumers.

A model is proposed to explore the relationships of service quality and customer satisfaction with a perceived value and their effect on transforming the corporate image and corporate reputation into the form of customer loyalty toward the bank. A survey is designed within this framework and SEM analysis is conducted in order to study the nature of relationships between variables of interest hypothesized to affect customer behavior and customer loyalty. Mediation tests for perceived value and corporate image and reputation are also conducted.

The findings of the survey indicate that corporate image and corporate reputation can be used as a common marketing benchmark to measure a bank’s performance. The results demonstrated that customers perceive quality and satisfaction effects loyalty through perceived value, image and reputation.

The study was conducted in Izmir, the third biggest city of Turkey. The sample is composed of regular customers, and the sample size is enough for the study but more studies are needed to generalize the results.

The results provide information to bank managers to effectively assist them to offer appropriate customer service levels sustaining satisfaction, quality and value to the customers within the transactions.

The paper studies the determinants of customer loyalty in the Turkish banking industry and considers the effects of corporate image and corporate reputation as measured by customer satisfaction, service quality and perceived value, on customer loyalty toward banks in Turkey. This model is not studied in bank marketing in Turkey and also in the banking literature.

The use of competitor analysis is a rapidly growing area of business activity, especially among major corporations, across the world. The old military stratagem “know your enemy; through knowing your enemy you can beat him/her”, has found new life in the contemporary business environment. Surveys carried out in Europe and the USA in 1989 found that two‐thirds of competitor analysis departments were less than three years old. Competitor analysis is becoming increasingly seen as a key component in strategy formulation, in particular, in forming marketing strategy.

Despite the theoretical advancements of market orientation and firm performance, there is a paucity of research regarding SMEs in Indonesia. Customer and competitor orientation were examined as two distinct constructs as per the literature, as it has been questioned for its robustness. They have been used synonymously, even though customer orientation is operationalised as a component of a market orientation construct. There is support for the argument from a theoretical point of view to keep customer orientation and competitor orientation separate. The objective of this research was to empirically test market orientation concepts on firm performance and assessing customer and competitor orientation separately. Furthermore, it also tests whether innovation plays a mediating role.

A sample of 309 small and medium-sized firms was found eligible for this study. Structural Equation Modelling was used to analyze the data. A multi-industry sample of firms was used to strengthen the generalisability of the results. The sample was acquired from two databases of SMEs directory in Kudus and Pati, East Java Indonesia, participants were randomly selected.

The findings show that innovation mediates the relationship between competitor orientation and firm performance, while competitor orientation had no significant relationship with firm performance. Customer orientation was found to positively influence firm performance.

The role of innovation as a mediator within SMEs in a developing country opens up avenues for further research among other developing countries. By examining both the concepts of customer and competitor orientation separately and establishing relationships, we validate support for this argument both from a methodological and theoretical point of view.

Most of the proposed decision aid methods provide the user only with a prescriptive approach (quantitative analysis) without any descriptive approach (qualitative analysis). It is therefore not possible to justify and recommend ways of improvement. The purpose of this paper is to introduce visualization techniques to complement prescriptive approaches.

Visual techniques have been developed for the FlowSort sorting method, namely the FS‐GAIA and stacked bar diagrams.

It is found that with visual techniques, fine details can be captured, e.g. detection of incomparability (with FS‐GAIA) and the composition of a score (with stacked bar diagrams).

In the future, it is expected that other multi‐criteria decision methods will be complemented by prescriptive approaches.

A real case study is introduced in order to illustrate the practicality of the visual techniques. In this paper, the innovation performances of small and medium enterprises from the French Lorraine region are assessed.

It is expected that the quality of the decisions taken are improved because of being better informed.

The paper, using a real case study, provides important new tools to enhance decision quality.

At present, in the increasingly global markets, one of the main challenges to international business is how to effectively manage human resources across cultural boundaries. In particular, high‐tech MNCs demand a specific pool of talented individuals with specific technical expertise and personal skills to be adapted to operate in an international arena. That is especially true in the case of China, which has attracted a significant variety of foreign investments from diverse countries and whose people management policies and managerial staff technical and personal skills are reported in some cases to be at a primary stage. The purpose of this paper is to explore the educational context development in China and its related influence on the recruitment and selection process in Western high‐tech MNCs in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

This is a research paper based on multiple case studies and direct face‐to‐face interviews.

China needs highly trained and highly educated individuals who can work in a dynamic domestic and global marketplace. Under the centrally planned system, the curricula in different universities are not associated to diversification in response to China changing economic needs and scenario. In most of the Chinese universities, many of the disciplines are very narrowly defined because these institutions are responsible for the job assignment of graduates. Despite the unprecedented growth of Chinese higher education thanks to the recent government reforms, the educational system in China still needs to be further restructured in its curricula to provide a sufficient number of qualified managers but however it will take time.

Nowadays, China needs highly trained and highly educated talents who can work in a domestic highly globalised marketplace. The underlying study will provide insight into those education related factors and their impact on the labour market in China with a specific focus on the search for appropriate technomanagement talents. The paper also provides insights into those educational factors, which produce satisfactory and less‐satisfactory results in recruitment of local talents in foreign technology companies. It also suggests the need for further research in the talent management area and education in PRC in relation to the current lack of data. Recommendations for the possible integration of appropriate educational projects aiming at developing highly talented individuals into those foreign corporations are provided.