Quality Management Practices in Indian ISO 9000 Certified Companies: an Empirical Evaluation

‘Quality’ is one of the challenges Indian companies have encountered during the post-liberalization. ISO 9000 certification by companies represents a strategy to meet this challenge. This study concerns the quality management practices in sixteen ISO 9000 certified companies in India. It aims at evaluating the degree of implementation of eight critical factors of quality management, and their impact on quality performance. It is found that ISO 9000 certification has helped the companies in improving their product quality only marginally. Quality management practices of ISO 9000 companies need further improvement and ISO 9000 quality management systems are to be integrated with TQM for continuous improvement of quality.