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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of business excellence tools, particularly the extent of adoption of the ISO 9004:2000 guideline and respondents' perceptions of its usefulness.

In this paper a large empirical study was undertaken to identify the use of business excellence frameworks in Canada. The survey was based on a series of in‐depth interviews with 15 standardization experts who are all members of the Canadian Advisory Committee on Quality Management CAC/ISO/TC176. It was mailed to a sample of small, medium, and large businesses that spanned a wide range of manufacturing and service sectors, resulting in 187 responses.

This paper finds that the application of business excellence tools by Canadian organizations seems to be a function of both the size and location of the organization. There may be differences in use between organizations within different industry sectors, and those with different organizational structures. ISO 9004:2000 is not widely used, and probably needs a complete overhaul.

The survey in this paper had a relatively low response rate. The small number of respondents who were familiar with ISO 9004:2000 precluded any statistical analysis of the data. The results are of interest to a variety of quality management researchers, as there is a paucity of literature on ISO 9004, particularly with experimental data.

Contributions in the paper extend to practitioners, as the survey included manufacturing and service sectors, both publicly and privately owned, as well as executives, since the study was aimed at top management of the organizations surveyed.

The paper shows that, while the concept of business excellence has rarely been researched from a Canadian perspective, the focus on ISO 9004:2000 makes this study totally unique.

ISO 9001 and ISO 9004 were created as a “consistent pair” of standards so that businesses that wanted to exceed the requirements of 9001 could use the principles of 9004 to move towards business excellence. In this paper, opinions from Canadian quality standardization experts were used to explore the needs of business against what is offered by ISO 9004 and to assist in the comparison of ISO 9004 with common business excellence models. The ISO 9004 (2000) document was perceived as needed, and as holding great potential. Suggestions for realizing that potential ranged from the inclusion of more guidance on specific business processes (for example complaints handling) to the incorporation of material that links ISO 9004 with industry‐specific standards, awards and/or general business programs. With modification, the document was seen as being able to make a valuable contribution to an organization's business excellence strategy. Without some form of recognition and/or award as offered by other business excellence models, however, the amount of usage ISO 9004 will receive is questionable.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the experience of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 certified companies, examining their motivations to introduce the standard and their perceived benefits and barriers. In parallel, the research investigated the knowledge and perception of ISO 9004 guideline, analyzing if it could give an added value to certified companies.

A questionnaire was proposed by e-mail to 2,581 Italian ISO 9001 certified companies from January 18 to March 31, 2016; 522 companies participated to the survey.

Companies of different size have been driven by different motivations to certification, reaching different types of benefits, while both large and small ones perceived the greater bureaucratization as an obstacle. The ISO 9004 standard is little known and applied among Italian companies, but the ones which adopted it benefited from it.

A limitation may be derived from the fact that the sample was composed only of Italian companies, although this effect was to understand perceptions and trends of these international standards in the Italian reality.

Analyzing perceived advantages and disadvantages of ISO 9001 and 9004 could be crucial for managers to understand if their joint use is the right strategy to gain competitiveness in the reference markets.

Compared to previous studies in which ISO 9001 was evaluated as a stand-alone standard, the research made a comparative evaluation with ISO 9004, as ISO considers them to be “consistent pair of standards,” covering the literature gap about the effectiveness of the joint use of them.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a self‐assessment scheme and processes that are developed for and applied to a R&D organization based on ISO 9004:2000. The presented self‐assessment has been performed during internal audits based on quality management system in Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea.

In order to enhance the reliability of the self‐assessment, the preliminary works such as training, workshop, case study and pre‐assessment rating are performed in advance before self‐assessment. Furthermore, this paper evaluates the reliability of self‐assessment results using Cohen's Kappa coefficient and the observed agreement index.

The results of this paper present that an organization's performance maturity level evolves sustainably through self‐assessment scheme and processes.

These results and lessons learned will be very useful to the organization that intends to enhance the performance of its R&D projects and processes and improve its processes continuously.

ISO 9004:2000 presents the guidelines of self‐assessment for the organization that intend to continually improve its performance considering the effectiveness and efficiency of a quality management system. According to ISO 9004, the range and depth of self‐assessment should be planned in relation to the organization's objectives and priorities. This paper discusses a self‐assessment scheme and processes that are developed for and applied to a R&D organization based on ISO 9004:2000.

This paper empirically determines the extent to which ISO 9001 certified small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) were able to attain the eight quality management princples on which the ISO 9004:2000 Standard is based. It employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process approach in determining the percent weightings of the principles and the self‐assessment questions which form part of the ISO 9004:2000 Standards. Of particular interest is a weakness of these enterprises in formulating policies addressing the needs and expectations of shareholders and the society in terms of the community and the public affected by the organisations or its products. This paper makes a contribution to the body of knowledge in the field of quality management in Trinidad and Tobago where such work is limited. It adds value by empirically measuring TQM implementation through determining the extent to which its criteria are implemented in ISO 9001 certified SMEs.

The continuous improvement in the performance and satisfaction of all stakeholders is a permanent management objective and part of an organisation’s strategy. To achieve this goal, organisations invest in technological upgrades, process improvements and management models that assure efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to verify the possibility of measuring the management maturity level of an organisation that is dedicated to passenger public transportation; this organisation is used as a reference framework for the self-evaluation maturity-level measurement tool provided by the ISO 9004:2009 standard.

The objective of this paper was accomplished through a case study in which the selected measurement instrument was applied to the management system of the maintenance area of one of the largest subway companies in Brazil.

The results of the study showed that the referential method was capable of precisely and adequately measuring the maturity level of the appraised management system. The method also enabled the researchers to identify best practices for the study organisation, which can be employed by the administration to develop action plans to improve their management system.

As a limitation, the results obtained by this paper cannot be generalised, because they were based on only one company. As a result, the conclusions established cannot be extended to other types of companies since their competitive priorities and management practices may be different and generate characteristics of maturity that were not considered in this work. However, these limitations can be minimised if additional researches ponder other types of organisations.

On the practical side, this paper motivates companies to improve their operations management by using the self-evaluation tool to identify gaps in their management systems and consequently plan actions to achieve the related improvements.

The ISO 9004:2009 standard provides a self-evaluation instrument that can support companies on measuring their respective management system maturity level. However, this paper was able to demonstrate that the aforesaid tool can be used in a broader way as it allows management to define action plans to boost their management systems towards a full utilisation of best management practices.

The international quality systems standard ISO 9000 is changing. Whilst much maligned, the standard has still done much to ensure basic quality requirements in world industry, commerce and the public sector. In November ISO 9001 is changing – dramatically – and ISO 9002 will no longer exist. This is probably the most substantial change in its history. In one major leap the international standard will come up to date with modern development in quality thinking. Quality assurance will never be quite the same again!The new version of ISO 9001 places emphasis on process management and resource management and has commonality of architecture with ISO 9004, so that quality assurance requirements and quality management aspirations can be aligned holistically. The standard will be reduced from a 20‐clause standard to a four‐clause standard. Further, it will be more holistic, more customer orientated and have more in common with other quality and excellence models. It is a good development, but it will mean changes, and the sooner organisations start to understand the new requirements, the readier they will be for avoiding the pitfalls!What, though, are the implications for organisational excellence? This paper discusses how the changes may assist the development of a holistic approach to excellence, but also the remaining areas of difficulty.

This paper describes the development of a scale for measuring top management commitment towards continual quality performance improvement in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). A set of self‐assessment questions of the ISO 9004: 2000 Standard was used to assess the adoption status of quality management practices. This paper investigates the inter‐item reliability and the content validity of the Quality Management Principles Scale (QMPS) in an integrated improvement process in SMEs. An empirical study was conducted to acquire senior management views on the use of the QMPS in manufacturing sectors in Trinidad and Tobago. Based on 328 responses from 110 SMEs, statistical software packages were used to analyse the empirical data and determine the reliability and validity of the QMPS. The paper contributes to develop a self‐assessment scale that can be used to measure top management commitment. It is anticipated that the findings would provide practical insights for evaluating the levels of maturity on performance improvement in SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and classify potential and verified benefits of implementing quality management systems (QMSs) according to ISO 9000 standards.

The research is based on a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, mostly articles relating to implementation of the ISO 9000 QMS and its impact on customer satisfaction and business performance.

The literature adduces possible benefits of the effective implementation of the ISO 9000 QMS and searches for related support in published empirical research. The paper classifies the major identified and empirically verified benefits into four groups in relation to the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach to categorising company objectives. It also relates the potential benefits to specific standard requirements and the pre‐conditions that must be met in the implementation stage of the ISO 9001 in order to attain these benefits.

This study of the benefits has not focused on the standard releases, so the benefits are not shown separately for each release. Besides, there is less research on the latest releases (from 2000 and 2008) and thus perhaps none of their benefits has been recognised.

By discussing the standards' requirements and the implementation approaches and circumstances that may impact on the effectiveness of the introduced QMS, such as motives for introducing the QMS and the strategic approach to its implementation, it tries to help management build their QMS so that potential benefits are realised.

By aggregating the outcome of several research papers the paper paints a “big picture” of the business benefits of effectively implementing the ISO 9000 QMS, which could be a step towards further research and help management and practitioners in companies to develop their QMS.

Standards play an increasingly important role in the development of the “global village”, both from the economic and the quality of life perspective. However, development of standards should always be in tune with the needs of a free economy, whose main engine is differentiation. Standardization and differentiation can be complementary, but only to the extent that a correct balance between the two is kept. The balance becomes particularly delicate when standards move from product‐related issues to organization‐related issues, as is the case of quality system standards. Starting from a brief review of ISO 9000 and its role in the past decade, then moving to Vision 2000, the paper expresses reservations about the benefits and opportunity for standards to enter the organizational improvement area. In a situation of continuous change and global competition, differentiation seems to be the name of the game, more than standardization. Instead, a kind of “standards syndrome” seems to take place, where standards are expected to legitimize managers’ choices.