تاثیر راه های کیفیت مدیریت زنجیره تامین بر کیفیت عملکرد: یک تحقیق تجربی The Influence of Supply Chain Quality Management Practices on Quality Performance: An Empirical Investigation

1. Introduction The current globalised business environment has forced businesses to shift their intrafirm focus on quality improvement to encompass the globalization of their quality strategy (Li, Su and Chen, 2011; Soltani et al., 2011; Wiengarten, Fynes and Onofrei, 2013; Lin, Kuei and Chai, 2013). This has encouraged operations and supply chain management scholars to discuss the need for implementing quality across the entire supply chain (see Kaynak and Hartley, 2008; Foster, Wallin and Ogden, 2011). Such revisit of internal quality strategy to take account of the dynamic nature of external supply chain network has proved to be core to a firm’s competitive standing and deemed essential to achieve desired quality and supply chain performance outcomes (see Vanichchinchai and Igel, 2011). Hence, quality is now viewed as a common supply chain goal and perceived to be the responsibility of all levels and actors in the supply chain, particularly in a context where business models show increasing trends to adopt servitization, IoT and circular economy models. Drawing on in-depth industrial interviews and extensive literature review, Lo and Yeung’s (2006) study suggests the application of supply quality management practices throughout the entire supply chain based on the understanding that a function has to view its upstream function as its supplier – if quality is to be managed effectively in supply chain. In the extant literature, Downloaded by University of Windsor At 08:04 19 May 2017 (PT) 3 such focus on the interface between quality and supply chain has been referred to as ‘Supply Chain Quality Management’ (SCQM hereinafter) (Lo and Yeung, 2006; Sila, Ebrahimpour and Birkholz, 2006; Foster, Wallin and Ogden, 2011; Kuei, Madu and Lin, 2011; Uluskan, Joines and Godfrey, 2016; Tsai and Hung, 2016). Since its initial conceptualisation by Ross (1998), the notion of SCQM has been increasingly gaining recognition as a vastly important topic for theorisation and research. However, it can be argued that much of the debate in this area has been relied on the theoretical inferences from either quality management (QM), supply chain management (SCM) practices or in very few cases on the interface between the two concepts rather than direct empirical scrutiny of SCQM practices as fully stand-alone theme and field of study. While existing studies of SCQM have laudably increased the interest of both academics and managers in the field of operations and supply chain management, they typically do not delve deeply into whether SCQM practices can influence and improve the quality of products and services produced. As our review of several most influential and frequently cited operations and supply chain management journals (e.g. SCMIJ, IJOPM, JOM, IJPE, IJPR) indicates (see Appendix 1), SCQM has not yet received a similar level of detail as exists in the operations-related supply chain and quality literature. Thus, there is the lack of a coherent theory and a consensual theoretical framework of fundamental principles underpinning SCQM coupled with the abundance of interpretations of what characterises SCQM. In addition, a review of the extant literature shows that while previous studies have identified performance effects of SCQM practices on quality at an aggregate level, the aggregate measure of SCQM impact on quality performance is unlikely to yield accurate measures of differences in quality performance across a broad and heterogeneous range of products and suppliers.