Towards the Enhancement of TQM Implementation in Smes : Case Study in Developing Countries

In developing countries, particularly for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs), TQM acts as a philosophy of continual improvement through a systematic, integrated, consistent, and organizational wide perspective. Unfortunately, SMEs' contribution to growth and employment is constrained by limited access to finance, restrictive business environment with strong incentives for informality, poor management and technical capacity, and difficult access to information. Hence, a scenario-based measurement instrument is presented to overcome these shortcomings and to ensure the comprehension of its content on behalf of respondents, through which the TQM adequacy and successful implementation could be achieved, implicitly for the Egyptian SMEs manufacturing sector.