Six sigma for small and medium-sized enterprises

Quality management (QM) in general deals with permanently redirecting a company's macro and micro operations towards the needs of internal and external customers. To maintain and extend competitive advantages in all dimensions and markets, companies shift increasingly from defining quality as a task that can be run by a quality department, to seeing it as the overall long-term umbrella objective of their business. The “Panorama of EU Industry” (n.d., cited by Ghobadian and Gallear, 1997) reports that “between 1980 and 1990 US companies with TQM achieved a compound annual growth of 16.9 per cent compared with 10.9 per cent...