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The literature includes many success and failure stories of the firms adopting total quality management (TQM). As many firms in Turkey try to adopt this philosophy, there is a need to clarify quality concepts and comment on applications. This paper attempts a broad review of the current status of TQM and ISO 9000 in Turkey. It considers the extent to which ISO 9000 and TQM are being successfully implemented. It also presents the reasons for obtaining an ISO 9000 certificate, difficulties faced during the registration process, improvements achieved and disappointments experienced after being certified. The findings of this study are compared with those from other countries.

A supplier selection decision inherently is a multi‐criterion problem. It is a decision of strategic importance to companies. The nature of this decision usually is complex and unstructured. Management science techniques might be helpful tools for these kinds of decision‐making problems. The aim of this paper is to use fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to select the best supplier firm providing the most satisfaction for the criteria determined. The purchasing managers of a white good manufacturer established in Turkey were interviewed and the most important criteria taken into account by the managers while they were selecting their supplier firms were determined by a questionnaire. The fuzzy AHP was used to compare these supplier firms.

This paper aims to create a fuzzy set perception of some quality characteristics in order to prepare a basis for further evaluation. It cites industries that have good quality characteristics as examples. A large amount of data about company characteristics and various factors pertaining to the implementation of total quality management and ISO 9000 was collected through a survey and its results and implications are discussed. In conclusion this paper provides a guide for companies in Turkey in their quest for quality and prepares a basis for a more general evaluation tool for developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how effective Turkish small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) use enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in module aspect and to assess the adherence to lean manufacturing requirements. Obtaining each efficiency result separately is not adequate to make an inference about relationship between ERP and lean practices. Hence, a relational model is developed to analyze correlation between use of ERP and lean manufacturing implementation in white goods manufacturing SMEs of Istanbul, Turkey.

The examination of the proposed conceptual framework is made by statistical analyses. In parallel, leveling efficiency of each enterprise requires an expert analysis in order to obtain a fair comparison. Hence, authors have visited each facility to evaluate performance of ERP efficiency and lean manufacturing applications. In Istanbul region, 53 of total listed SMEs are visited. The questionnaire survey is designed by considering different scales of performance. Exploratory factor analyses and various correlation analyses are applied to figure out relationship between ERP use and lean manufacturing.

Interaction with rapid development of information technology (IT) and progress in modern production management strategies have emerged. Obtained results show that Turkish SMEs have widely initiated lean production practices. However, applications are in initial level in the most cases. In respect to ERP systems, enterprises are more active, some basic modules are extensively used. Another finding of this study implies that effective usage of specific ERP modules can contribute toward applying lean principles, vice versa.

The whole sample space of white goods SMEs could not be covered due to the fact that, each facility is visited and field studies are done. However, sample size calculations prove that attained feedback is statistically significant (adequate) to reflect sample space.

The literature studies reveal that there is an obvious lack of studies which focus on relationship between ERP use and lean manufacturing. Finding such a correlation helps IT-practitioners to design ERP modules by assessing related requirements of lean philosophy.

Contractor prequalification is a typical multiple criteria decision‐making problem that includes both quantitative and qualitative criteria. The conditions surrounding the prequalification decision are often imprecise, subjective and uncertain; assessments are consequently made using linguistic approximations. Fuzzy set theory is specifically designed to handle qualitative and linguistic data based on approximations and provides a method of representing in numerical form the linguistic approximations used to describe the decision‐maker judgments. However, fuzzy set theory has a weakness in identification of the relative weights of the decision criteria. On the other hand, one of the most accurate and easy methods for identifying the relative weights is the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This paper seeks to address these issues.

The main objective of this paper is to develop a new integrated decision model composed of fuzzy set theory and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodologies approach that takes full advantages of the fuzzy set theory and the AHP. Two fuzzy approaches are considered, namely Chang's extent analysis and Jaskowski aggregated group decision analysis.

Both approaches are applied and validated on actual contractors in the Egyptian construction market. A software tool is developed to automate the calculations and a case study is provided.

This research produced a new integrated decision model composed of fuzzy‐AHP methodology approach that takes full advantages of the fuzzy set theory and AHP for tackling the uncertainty and imprecision of contractor prequalification during the prequalification stage, where the decision‐makers comparison judgments are represented as fuzzy triangular numbers. The default criteria used in this model had been collected through the literature review and experts’ opinion for building projects.