The effectiveness analysis of the practices in five quality management stages for SMEs

The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in economic development for any country. Thus, the SMEs need to raise their competitive advantage. Usually, they consider “quality” as the competitive weapon, but because of the limited resources and lack of talent, they perform very few quality practices only, and result in a very limited effectiveness. In order to assist SMEs to raise their competition based on the improvement of quality, we develop a systematic framework of quality management with five stages for SMEs. Based on this developed model, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the status of the implementation levels and the effectiveness degrees of the practices in the five stages for the SMEs. We also analyze the implementation performance of the practices based on the I-E matrix.