Degree

Master of Business Administration Executive

Faculty / School

School of Business Studies (SBS)

Year of Award

2023

Advisor/Supervisor

Faisal Jalal, Visiting Faculty, Institute of Business Administration

Project Type

MBA Executive Research Project

Access Type

Restricted Access

Executive Summary

Attention to quality escalated in the late 1980s when the American economy suffered to come in competition with Japan. The triumph of Japan pushed U.S. industries to realize the importance of quality in their businesses and to explore competitive advantages that they could bring in their products to prevent business failures. With quality becoming the utmost requirement of consumers and competition meeting customer expectations, the businesses resorted to total quality management (TQM) as the tool to improve business performance. The trend of rising customer expectations and continuous innovations resulted in upgradation of quality from a product level to an organization level that encouraged organizations to take strategic business initiatives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several countries started award programs which began honoring best quality practices. The award program underwent repetitive improvements in criteria and administration with the evolving quality requirements. The quality award programs got recognition at national level and the awards also offered models and tools to help organizations in implementing quality driven strategies, benchmarking best practices, performing self-examination, and ultimately achieving competitiveness. The three renowned award models Deming Prize (Japan), Malcolm Baldrige Award (USA) and European Quality Award (Europe) got more attention due to first mover advantage. Other countries partially or fully adapted these awards as a guide in implementing proven business excellence initiatives. Currently, there is no clearly defined framework for gauging & achieving operational excellence for Pakistani Companies at the national level even though there have been attempts by Pakistan’s government but there’s no traceability of actual implementation so far. In the pursuit of operational excellence, the research is conducted to identify and evaluate the importance of quality awards with the aim to develop framework for the Pakistani Industrial sector to help in benchmarking best practices and become more competitive in the global economy. Three research objectives were set which are as follows: 1. To adapt a framework to gauge operational excellence in Pakistani firm. 2. To establish a project management plan for implementation of the framework. 3. To improve the framework and align processes according to KATI representatives. ix Keeping these objectives in perspective, we carried out our secondary research and covered the following stages. • Studying the importance of Quality & Operational / Performance excellence in Businesses. • Studying different world-renowned quality awards. • Evolution and global adaptation of different awards. • Implementation and evaluation of perceived benefits of excellence awards. • Short comings and critical success factors. The particular research methodology is extracted from the research onion, and which is identified as inductive and thus qualitative methods are used to collect data in the primary research. The initial phase of our research study entails the validation of the well-recognized framework keeping in view the Pakistani firms followed by in-depth interviews and focus groups. The primary goal is to adapt a framework, addressing the challenging environment of Pakistan’s trade and industry sector. The interviews and focus groups were carried out with some of the most established profiles in the following sectors by using snowball and convenience sampling techniques. • Manufacturing • Service • Education After the primary research, it was identified that most of the sectors are not using any of such operational excellence frameworks instead most of them are using other measurement tools like six sigma, kaizen, ISO etc. and almost all of the participants agreed that such frameworks are necessary in Pakistan. Some of the key points from this primary research are as follow. • Leadership regarded with the utmost importance in every sector. • Strategic Planning and Customers were remarked as the backbone of business after Leadership. The responses helped us in modeling a localized framework based on Pakistan’s dynamics based on “Multi Criteria Decision Making (AHP)” analysis which can help firms / organizations in achieving operational excellence and extract the benefits accordingly. x Recommendations have been put forward at the end, keeping in view the research carried out, where suggestions are provided to develop and set goals in the light of organization’s mission and vision, implement two-way communication to create customer feedback loop and motivate workforce, Strategic planning should address the need for resilience, emerging technologies and opportunities for innovation to ensure the procedures remain effective and lastly business results should always be given priority to make improvement in all key areas.

Pages

xi, 215

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