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This article offers a novel approach that brings together management, engineering and organizational behavior. It focuses on the understanding of organizational dynamics in an era of technological change, upholding the importance of organizational agility and of the cultural paradigm in the management of organizations.

In this work, the authors present the conclusions from a set of studies carried out in organizations operating in technical and technological industries. The authors assessed the capabilities of these organizations in terms of operational excellence maturity and its impact on the organizational culture and organizational agility.

Results show the importance of operational excellence either in developing or expanding organizational agility capabilities while reinforcing the cruciality of an excellence-oriented culture to sustain these efforts over time.

Increasingly unstable business environments have led to a growing interest in how to develop and maintain operational excellence in the face of continued and disruptive change. However, this interest has, so far, been advanced with little empirical evidence to support the corresponding predictions. This work offers the first practical evidence that continued focus and optimization of operations, with the right cultural alignment, helps organizations survive and thrive in increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

ISO 9001 certification is nowadays considered to be one of the most effective tools that can be adopted for guiding the management of Quality Systems. The stunning growth observed by these standards all over the world confirms a strong polarization of enterprises' interest in this practice. Owing to the wide incidence of this phenomenon, a deep investigation of ISO 9001 diffusion over time is of mandatory importance. The research here reported covers the development of statistical models in order to characterize the ISO 9001 certification evolution on a country basis, as well as worldwide.

Based on the pioneering results obtained by Saraiva and Duarte, an attempt is now made to: identify clusters of countries, according to their ISO 9001 evolution patterns; characterize the worldwide ISO 9001 certification evolution; identify which are the main evolution perspectives for ISO 9001 diffusion; identify significant variables that may influence ISO 9001 quality management systems diffusion; develop mathematical models in order to characterize the ISO 9001 certification evolution on a country‐by‐country basis.

The research carried out allowed one to analyze the worldwide evolution of ISO 9001 certification and suggest new prediction models for the diffusion of quality management systems certification at different geographical realities.

This paper covers the development of statistical models in order to characterize the ISO 9001 certification evolution on a country basis, as well as worldwide.

In the past few years, management systems implementation and certification has become a common practice among different types of organizations. In this context, quality management systems certification, according to the ISO 9001 standard is in the spotlight, due to over than 1.000.000 certified organizations by the end of 2009. Quality management systems can be integrated with an increasing variety of other subsystems implemented according to other standards, including environmental systems, health and safety, social responsibility, R&D, risk, or human resources, and subsystems raised from specific standards designed for specific activity sectors (HACCP, automotive or aeronautics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals and software). Due to this evolution, careful attention should be taken on how these different subsystems have been and should be articulated, harmonized and integrated. Thus, this paper intends to approach different strategies to achieve integration, with several levels of intensity, depth and authenticity between the different subsystems, and report some final recommendations related with good practices assuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the integration process.

A case study methodology has supported this research. Three case studies were conducted on Portuguese companies that have an integrated quality, environmental and safety management system.

If the companies' strategy is to implement more than one management system, there is a clear advantage of doing it supported on an integrated approach, avoiding the development of organizational “islands” related to each subsystem. This organizational “archipelago” structure is completely far way from any global optimized solution, based on a holistic perspective.

Based on the conclusions that we were able to find out, this paper is an important contribution to the integrated management systems research area, because it states different integration approaches and levels of integration and what are the features that characterize each one of those approaches and levels.

This paper seeks to present an optimization‐based approach to design acceptance sampling plans by variables for controlling non‐conforming proportions in lots of items. Simple and double sampling plans with s known and unknown are addressed. Normal approximation distributions proposed by Wallis are employed to handle plans with s unknown. The approach stands on the minimization of the average sampling number (ASN) taking into account the constraints arising from the two point conditions on the operating characteristic (OC) curve. The resulting optimization problems fall under the class of mixed integer non‐linear programming (MINLP), and are solved employing GAMS. The results obtained strongly agree with classical acceptance sampling plans found in the literature, although outperforming them in some cases, and providing a general approach to address other cases.

The approach takes the form of formulation of the design of acceptance sampling plans by variables for non‐conforming proportions as optimization problems minimizing the ASN with the constraints being the acceptance probability at the controlled points of the OC curve, and subsequent solution of the mathematical programming problems arising with mathematical programming algorithms.

The results are in strong agreement with acceptance sampling plans available in the literature. The approach presented here outperforms the classical plans in some cases and its generality allows one to design other plans without the requirement of additional relations between the parameters and intensive enumerative algorithms.

The paper presents an optimization‐based approach to design robust acceptance sampling plans by variables for non‐conforming proportions that allows a general treatment and disregards the need for computational intensive enumerative‐based procedures.

By exploiting the relationships between Six Sigma and quality management systems (QMS) based on the ISO 9001 standard, this paper proposes a set of guidelines to combine and integrate both approaches in a systematic way. The guidelines are organised into integration topics, and each one is linked to the clauses of the ISO 9001 standard they refer to.

Based on the literature review, Six Sigma and QMS based on the ISO 9001 standard are thoroughly discussed and compared and beneficial synergies between them are identified. Based on this study, and to take advantage of the compatibilities and logical linkages between both approaches, guidelines for the integration of Six Sigma with the ISO 9001 requirements are developed.

Benefits resulting from the integration of Six Sigma with a QMS based on the ISO 9001 standard are mutual. The integration guidelines proposed in this paper provide a framework to unify process management practices, enhance the effectiveness of continual improvement efforts, facilitate the identification, evaluation and selection of Six Sigma projects, align the quality objectives defined for the QMS with Six Sigma project goals, establish relationships between the roles of a Six Sigma program and those inherent to an ISO 9001 QMS, and demonstrate how internal quality audits and management review benefit from a Six Sigma program.

The integration models and guidelines herein proposed can be further expanded to include other relevant normative references, particularly environmental management systems (ISO 14001) and safety and health management systems (OHSAS 18001).

The set of guidelines proposed in this paper is original and will be of practical value to the increasing number of organisations adopting a process‐model for the ISO 9001 standard, that seek to incorporate Six Sigma principles, practices, methods and tools within their QMS. The guidelines cover a wide spectrum of relevant activities that usually take place in the context of both initiatives. In addition, because each guideline is accompanied by the identification of the applicable clauses of ISO 9001, they provide a useful framework to develop, implement, maintain, and improve a QMS in parallel with a Six Sigma program.

The majority of ISO 9001 certification research studies conducted so far are supported by survey methodologies and descriptive statistics. As such, they express conclusions that are mainly derived from opinions and perceptions about the subject. Thus, it is common to find in the open literature references that point out the highly subjective results derived from such studies (often of somewhat contradictory nature). This paper tries to compile the main conclusions that ISO 9001 research studies have tried to address, with the aim of describing the quality management systems literature state‐of‐the‐art.

In order to achieve this objective, an exhaustive literature review of ISO 9000 studies was carried out. For that purpose approximately 100 articles were analysed, which were sorted in the following categories, according to the used methodology: surveys; analysis of financial indicators; case studies; interviews; literature review; and statistical data analysis.

This paper reflects an exhaustive literature review, which allowed the identification of a group of issues that ISO 9001 research studies have tried to address, as well as the most commonly used methodologies employed and main conclusions reached so far by the different authors. Then using such a state‐of‐the‐art as a starting point, it pointed out a number of questions that seem to be relevant but have not been so far addressed in the open literature in terms of providing clear and precise answers, as well as others that are at the core of the authors' future work in this area.

The value of the paper is to point out and to compile the main conclusions reached by the different authors and researchers in the most important ISO 9001 issues addressed in the open literature.

This purpose of this paper is to present an optimization‐based approach to support the design of attribute sampling plans for lot acceptance purposes, with the fraction of non‐conforming items being modeled by a Poisson probability distribution function.

The paper approach stands upon the minimization of the error of the probability of acceptance equalities in the controlled points of the operating curve (OC) with respect to sample size and acceptance number. It was applied to simple and double sampling plans, including several combinations of quality levels required by the producer and the consumer. Formulation of the design of acceptance sampling plans as an optimization problem, having as a goal the minimization of the squared error at the controlled points of the OC curve, and its subsequent solution employing GAMS.

The results are in strong agreement with acceptance sampling plans available in the open literature. The papers approach in some scenarios outperforms classical sampling plans and allows one to identify the lack of feasible solutions.

An optimization‐based approach to support the design of acceptance sampling plans for attributes was conceived and tested. It allows for a general treatment of these problems, including the identification of a lack of feasible solutions, as well as making possible the determination of feasible alternatives by relaxing some model constraints.

Despite all the studies carried out in order to analyze the impact of quality management systems' implementation and certification on companies' financial performance, conclusions reached so far have a contradictory nature. Some authors conclude that there is a positive relationship between ISO 9001 certification and companies' financial improvement, while others do not find evidence to support such a relationship. The purpose of this paper is to present the main results derived from a research project developed in order to analyze the economical impact of quality management system implementation and certification on companies' performance.

This paper describes the results obtained from studying the economic impact of quality management systems, based on the adoption of a case study methodology. The authors' goal was to reconstruct the companies' financial history with the aim of identifying the benefits and costs directly related to their quality management systems. The analyzed time period ranged from the year when the company decided to implement its quality management system up to the present.

Results show that it is not unanimous that certified companies would be less profitable if they had not implemented their quality management systems.

This paper tries to be an important contribution to the worldwide research related to the quality management systems' impact on companies' financial performance.