A quality competitiveness index for benchmarking

The operations strategy literature has identified four primary dimensions on which a firm competes with another. These are: price, quality, flexibility, and delivery dependability. Of these, quality is perhaps the most critical dimension in terms of the impact on the degree of competitiveness imparted to a firm by a competitiveness dimension. In this paper, we propose a quantitative measure – quality competitiveness index (QCI) – to determine the degree to which a firm’s quality practices and policies are instrumental in improving its competitiveness. The QCI can be effectively employed for benchmarking among competing firms. More importantly, however, the process leading to the determination of QCI is itself an educative one – the weaknesses and strengths of a company with respect to its quality practices and policies come right to the fore and the company can usefully employ this information to improve competitiveness for quality.