Total quality management in Papua New Guinea: a survey of current practices

There has been a major concern expressed among industrial buyers, suppliers, manufacturers and customers about the quality of goods and services offered in Papua New Guinea. The need to implement quality programs in firms is inspired by claims of decline in sales of goods and services of certain firms, customers’ complaints and dissatisfaction with services, which should be of high standards and quality. This study has been proposed to identify firms which are implementing total quality management. There were 410 firms involved in this study. Basically, the study was carried out to identify whether or not these firms were successfully implementing TQM and what were the programs applied and the results achieved. Generally, the study revealed that there was not even one firm fully implementing TQM in its operations. Various reasons were cited for that problem.