Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management

 

Special Issue on: "Total Quality Management in the 21st Century Service Sector"

Guest Editors:
Professor Om Prakash Yadav, North Dakota State University, USA
Professor Rakesh Jain, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, India
Professor Bharatendra K. Rai, University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth, USA

Quality holds the key to competitiveness in today’s global market, regardless of the size of the company. Despite the fact that quality management practices are primarily embraced in manufacturing sector, quality management in the service industries has been gaining momentum over the past decade. Today, we observe that a large number of service organisations are taking initiatives to implement TQM. To implement TQM effectively, it is necessary to understand clearly the unique characteristics of the service operations. While much has been researched about quality management in manufacturing, the focus on quality in service industries has only been recent.

The service sector covers a very wide spectrum of differentiated organisations such as health care, education, banking, insurance, hotels, transport, etc., to name but a few. It involves a very large number of people in a variety of work processes. The service sector has become the dominant element of the economy in the industrialised nations. This special issue invites submission of papers that present role, barriers, challenges and issues of new quality improvement initiatives in the service sector. It will have implications for all managers and entrepreneurs responsible for quality improvement in service sector including SMEs. Conceptual, empirical, survey, and case-based papers are welcome.

Subject Coverage
Topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:

• Strategies of quality improvement in the service sector
• Impact of ISO 9000 on quality assurance in the service sector
• Barriers in implementing quality improvement programmes, techniques and tools in the service sector
• Challenges and issues of quality improvement efforts in the service sector
• Tools and techniques of quality improvement
• Diffusion of quality improvement initiatives in the service sector
• Information technology/systems (IT/S) such as the Internet, WWW, e-commerce, ERP and RFID in quality improvement in the service sector
• Lean and six sigma for service quality assurance
• Quality function deployment (QFD) in service sector quality management
• Application of concurrent engineering (CE) in service sector quality management
• Total quality management (TQM) in service supply chain (SSS)
• Implications of ethics, globalisation and technology in service quality management
• Role of service product and process design in service quality assurance (SQA).
• Managing human resource for total quality assurance in the service sector

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Papers Submission section under Author Guidelines

Important Dates

Manuscript submission: 31 December, 2007

Notification of editorial decision: 31 March, 2008

Submission of final manuscript: 31 May, 2008