Benchmarking for Best Practice

2    Achieving a competitiveadvantage through TQM

There are countless ways of management and doing business, which also means that there is unlimited room for improvement. Anything we do can almost always be done a little better.

Konosuke Matsushita. Founder of Matsushita ElectricalCompany

2.1  Parameters of a modern competitive approach

2.1.1  Emphasis on the customer

It seems that the criteria for competing in the 1990s and beyond are going to be fundamentally different from traditional ways of managing business organizations. Obsession with customers and their wants is going to be the norm and indeed, frameworks of assessing quality applications, such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) and the European Quality Award (EQA) ...