Quality Management in the Chain Saw Industry: A Case Study

An industry‐wide analysis of quality management methods was conducted in the chain saw industry. It was found that all other firms have within the past five years followed the industry leader in implementing statistical quality control, vendor management and reliability engineering. The study found that the dollar amount spent on quality assurance capital equipment, the amount of training, the proportion of engineering personnel and the sophistication of the data processing capability to rank correlate well with the product quality. In terms of quality costs, the inverse relationship between the traditional ASQC quality costs and product quality was observed. It was also observed that the amount devoted to the capital equipment in the quality assurance budget grew both proportionally and absolutely. Finally, it was observed that in terms of relative quality, the costs of the engineering personnel and market research personnel were higher for firms with high product quality.