The Efficiency Evaluation of Total Quality Management in the Korean Industry with Data Envelopment Analysis

As all the other managerial activities, total quality management (TQM) has also inputs into and outputs from the process. Therefore, the principal managerial efficiency criteria of maximum outputs with minimum inputs should be applied to TQM. In this paper, the methodology for the performance evaluation of TQM by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was proposed. DEA is used to measure the efficiency of TQM for each firm withe the input and output data obtained by questionnaire. It is found that there are not significant differences between the firms with and without ISO9000 certification and between the large and small‐sized firms with respect to the TQM efficiency.