Modelling the enablers of quality management practices using ISM

Quality plays a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction in the recent era of globalisation and quality management practices play a crucial role in achieving quality standards. The purpose of this paper is to represent an approach to the effective implementation of quality management practices by identifying the subtleties between various enablers of quality management. A hierarchical model is developed using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) depicting the mutual relationships among the enablers of quality management practices. The analysis indicates that there is a category of enablers with high driving power and low dependency that needs full focus and has strategic value, whereas another group consists of those variables that are highly dependent and are the resulting behaviour. The classification of enablers into independent and dependent variables would enable quality managers to concentrate on the important variables that are the key in building a strong quality management system in the organisation.