PREFACE

Quality has always been an important issue in the manufacturing organisations.

However the quality has for long been restricted to quality control measures which
include inspection and testing of the finished and semi finished product. These
quality control measures have been relied upon as a means of segregating good from
bad. However each reject has an impact of cost of production and on other
parameters of performance like timely deliveries.

With the advent of globalization, the quality control has been replaced by quality
assurance and fiirther as quality management. The quality management is a concept
of preventing defects rather than identifying and segregating defects. The quality
management concept is based upon the fact that everybody in the organisation is
equally responsible for quality problems.

ISO 9000 was developed in 1987 as a quality management system, which addresses
all aspects of the organisation having impact on quality. More than a product
standard, it is a system standard which requires a cultural change m the
organisations. ISO 9000 is a generic standard applicable to manufacturing and
service industry both.

ISO 9000 started gaining popularity in the Indian industry during 1990"s. Garment
industry in India which is one of the largest industry, contributing to foreign
exchange of the coimtry, started adopting ISO 9000 during 1995-96 and since then a
large number of garment export houses have registered themselves as ISO 9000
compliant.

However the motive of the management of garment industry behind adopting ISO
9000 quality management systems was more for ornamentation rather than deriving
actual benefits of the system. As a result, comparison of the cost of achieving ISO
9000 with the benefits derived created dissatisfaction in the management. The
problems associated with the cultural change added to this satisfaction.

Hence it was appropriate to study the motive of the management of garment export
houses behind adopting the quality management systems and the impact of ISO
9000 on the performance of the organisation. It was also relevant to study the

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various problems associated with the implementation of ISO 9000 in the
organisations.

The present study identifies the above stated issues in implementing ISO 9000 and
also establishes a relation between the impact on performance measures and
satisfaction derived from implementing ISO 9000 in the garment industry.

The thesis has been divided into 8 chapters.

Chapter 1 gives brief introduction to ISO 9000 quality management systems and its
impacts and implementation problems in the industry

Chapter 2 deals with the review of literature available on implementation, motives,

performance measures, impacts and problems associated with implementation of
ISO 9000.

Chapter 3 describes the methodology used in the research. It also defines the tools
of statistics used in the analysis.

Chapter 4 deals with analysis and interpretation of the collected data and derives
results out of the analysis.

Chapter 5 describes the discussion andfindingsof the results of study

Chapter 6 describes the conclusion of the study. It also deals with the future
research directions

Chapter 7 deals with the managerial implications of the study.

Chapter 8 is the list of references used in the study.

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