Resource Allocation for Strategic Quality Management

291 Pages·2017·3.57 MB·English

Resource Allocation for Strategic Quality Management : A
Goal Programming Approach
Author
Alidrisi, Hisham Mostafa
Published
2010
Thesis Type
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
School
School of Engineering
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/3629
Copyright Statement
The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.
Downloaded from
http://hdl.handle.net/10072/368103
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Resource Allocation for Strategic Quality Management:
A Goal Programming Approach

Hisham Mostafa Alidrisi
BSc (Industrial Engineering), MEng (Engineering Management)

Griffith School of Engineering
Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology
Griffith University

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

April 2010
Declaration
This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any
university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no
material previously published or written by another person except where due
reference is made in the thesis itself

Hisham Mostafa Alidrisi
April 2010

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Acknowledgements

First, and foremost, praise is due to almighty ALLAH, Who bestowed me to
complete this work. Many thanks are also due to my principal supervisor,
Professor Sherif Mohamed, for providing me with the opportunity to complete
this PhD study under his supervision. I am greatly indebted to Professor
Mohamed for providing the academic and technical assistance. I also
appreciate his unlimited support towards improving my research skills.
Many thanks for his patience, efforts, and valuable guidance.

Special thanks to my wife, Mona, for her patience, care, support, and
continuous encouragement, which enabled me to complete this thesis. Her
sacrifices have not gone unnoticed. Many thanks are also due to my little
son, Abdullah, for being a source of joy, laughter and encouragement
throughout.

I extend special thanks to my mother, Salma, and my father, Mustafa, for
their continuous support and prayers.

I owe my gratitude to my brother, sisters, relatives and friends who have
always encouraged me during the study period.

Many thanks are also due to all individuals (and their respective
organizations) who willingly participated in the questionnaire and the semi-
structured interviews.

Last, but not least, I am indebted to all my RHD colleagues, whether from
the School of Engineering or from other schools, for their lively discussions
and conversations. Thanks to Griffith University for providing such a
stimulating and knowledge-sharing environment.
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Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to assist organizations in understanding the nature of
quality management from a resource-based perspective by investigating the
relationship between strategies needed to drive quality enhancement, and resources
being allocated to support effective strategy implementation. To achieve this
research aim, the thesis employs both quantitative and qualitative analysis
techniques to give insight into how quality management strategies and resources
interact.

The thesis argues that organizations may veer away from their quality management
implementation plans because of an inherent mismatch between the needed and
allocated resources to support strategy implementation. Therefore, a secondary aim
of this thesis is to develop a methodology whereby an organization can: 1) determine
how their resources are being allocated to support different quality enhancement
strategies, and 2) identify any resource discrepancy between what is needed by a
certain strategy, and what is being allocated to it.

For any organization, whether small or large, manufacturing or service, Total
Quality Management (TQM) is a recognized source of competitive advantage to
sustain the organization’s position against its competitors. Benefits of applying TQM
have been reported by various industries; in particular, the food-processing
industry where quality is a major strategic issue. Food-processing organizations
recognize that higher quality leads to better product reputation, increased market
share and higher profits. They also operate under strict regulatory requirements,
and therefore, adopt formal and disciplined approaches to quality management.
Consequently, and keeping the above research aims in mind, this thesis adopts an
organizational case study approach to explore quality management resource-
strategy interactions, and related resource distribution challenges confronting
Quality Departments in two of the largest food-processing organizations in Saudi
Arabia.

Two broad sets of elements are fundamental to the success of TQM: soft elements
(e.g. management commitment, employment empowerment, etc.) and hard elements
(e.g. control processes, technology utilization, etc.). Although the literature does not
clearly demonstrate which set of elements is more significantly related to business
and organizational performance, all TQM elements can be viewed as human,
organizational, and technological resources. It is this resource-based view of TQM
elements that led this thesis to deal with quality management from a strategic
viewpoint, or what is known as Strategic Quality Management (SQM).

Critical review of the SQM literature identified eight strategies as drivers of quality
enhancement. These strategies include the continuous: 1) use of human knowledge,
2) control of quality costs, 3) check of failures, 4) transfer of customer feedback, 5)
approach towards targets, 6) management of quality information, 7) management of
the quality system itself, and 8) the periodical quality appraisal (i.e. auditing). The
review also highlighted a lack of theoretical framework or empirical model to
examine the various levels of contribution of each strategy towards quality
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enhancement, or to guide the process of resource allocation among those eight
strategies.

To bridge these identified research gaps, the thesis adopts a two-phase research
methodology. In the first phase, the thesis handles the issue of resource allocation
from the perspective of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) as two MCDM
techniques, namely Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Goal Programming (GP), are
employed. In the first step of the first phase, a conceptual framework comprising
three clusters (resources, strategies, and ability to enhance quality) has been
developed in the form of a multi-criteria decision problem where the ANP was
employed to model resource-dependence and resource-strategy interactions. This
phase required the development and distribution of a questionnaire targeting
managers who worked in the Quality Departments for the two selected
organizations. The managers were asked to compare a pair of elements (e.g.
resources or strategies) at a time with respect to a control criterion (e.g. supporting
a certain strategy or enhancing overall quality).

Evaluating the dependence and feedback, among and within the framework
clusters, provided a systematic and objective way of deriving the weights to be used
for prioritizing strategies (in terms of their individual contribution towards quality
enhancement), and determining the relative levels of resource influence on each
other, and on strategy implementation. Moreover, this phase identified resource-
allocation discrepancies between what each strategy needs and what it actually
receives from available resources.

The second step of the first phase of the research utilized the output of the ANP
analysis as input for a Goal Programming (GP) model to identify to what extent each
strategy is under- or over-resourced. The model results indicated that both
organizations, despite having different strategy priorities, need to re-allocate their
resources to better support their quality enhancement strategies. The model results
revealed interesting observations. For instance, one company ranked the strategy of
controlling quality costs as having the least ability to enhance overall quality;
however, this particular strategy was then found to be over-resourced by as much
as 70%. Similarly, in the second company, the strategy of check of failures is the
most over-resourced (16.8%), even though it is priority 6 in terms of resources that
should be allocated for the eight strategies.

In the second phase of the research, a series of semi-structured interviews were
conducted with 12 managers working for the two organizations. For each
organization, the interviews ascertained how individual quality, supply chain or
information technology managers manage, evaluate, and report the progress of
strategy implementation. The interviews’ findings not only shed some light on
quality management practices, and resource availability and allocation, but were
also used to see if the quantitative output resulting from the developed hybrid ANP-
GP methodology would be corroborated.

There are two main contributions made by this thesis: 1) contribution to the
existing body of knowledge on quality management through the development of a
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conceptual framework that explicitly captures the interactions among, and within,
quality management resources and strategies, and 2) contribution to current
industry practice through the provision of a methodology whereby organizations
would identify resource-strategy allocation discrepancies, and hence be able to
convey a message to senior management of what resource is needed, and to which
strategy the identified resource should be allocated, thus improving the overall level
of resource utilization.

The proposed methodology relies heavily on the expertise, knowledge and experience
of managers. As such, it involves subjective assessment of both qualitative and
quantitative factors at a particular organization, as well as pertinent industry or
country level variables. Consequently, the findings reported herein can only be
analytically generalized in the context of large organizations operating in the Saudi
food-processing industry. Nevertheless, the proposed methodology is generic in
nature and could be replicated to provide a deliberate and structured approach to
resource utilization in the context of implementing quality enhancement strategies.

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List of Peer-Reviewed Publications

The following papers were produced to disseminate some results from the
work undertaken by the author during the course of this PhD research.

Journal Paper
1. Alidrisi, H. and Mohamed, S (--). “Resource Allocation for Strategic
Quality Management: A Goal Programming Approach.” International
Journal of Quality & Reliability Management (under review).

Conference Paper
1. Alidrisi, H. and Mohamed, S. (2009). “Resource Allocation for Strategic
Quality Management: An Analytic Network Process (ANP) Model.”
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Construction in the
21st Century (CITC-V), May 20-22, 2009, Istanbul, Turkey, 789-795.

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Table of Contents
Declaration ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract iv
List of Peer-Reviewed Publications vii
Table of Contents viii
List of Figures xiv
List of Tables xvi
Acronym xviii
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Background 1
1.2 Research Rationale 7
1.3 Research Objectives 16
1.4 Research Design and Methodology 19
1.5 Thesis Organization 20
Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.1 Introduction 23
2.2 Categorization of Resources 23
2.3 The Role of Resources in Strategic Management 27
2.3.1 Definitions of Strategy and Resources 27
2.3.2 Resources as an Internal Power of Organization 30
2.3.3 Resources as a Creator of Competitive Advantage 33
2.2.4 The Strategic Role of the European Foundation
for Quality Management (EFQM) 35
2.4 The Role of Resources in Quality Management 37
2.4.1 Technological Resources and Quality Management 37
2.4.2 Organizational Resources and Quality Management 40
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2.4.3 Human Resources and Quality Management 43
2.4.4 TQM Elements as Resources 46
2.5 Strategic Quality Management (SQM) 46
2.5.1 Quality as a Competitive Advantage 47
2.5.2 Linking Quality to Strategy 49
2.5.3 Definition of SQM 51
2.6 Goal Programming and Analytic Network Process
in Resources and Quality Issues 55
2.6.1 GP and ANP/AHP in Resource Allocation 55
2.6.2 GP and ANP/AHP in Improving Quality 57
2.7 Summary 58
Chapter 3: Research Methodology
3.1 Introduction 60
3.2 The Quantitative Phase 60
3.2.1 First Step: The Analytic Network Process (ANP) 63
3.2.1.1 What is ANP? 63
3.2.1.2 Why ANP? 71
3.2.1.3 ANP Analysis 72
3.2.2 The Second Step: The Goal Programming (GP) 75
3.2.2.1 What is Goal Programming (GP)? 75
3.2.2.2 Why GP? 78
3.2.2.3 The GP Model 81
3.3 The Qualitative Phase 83
3.3.1 Semi-Structured Interviews 83
3.3.2 Why Semi-structured Interview? 84
3.3.3 Conducting the Semi-structured Interviews 85
3.4 Summary 86

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