Impact of Total Quality Management Practice on Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Nigeria. (A Case Study of Small Business Owners in Lagos)
The paper takes a look at the impact of total Quality Management Practice on Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Lagos State: a case study of Small business owners in Lagos. However, the paper makes use of primary data of questionnaire analysis and the objectives of the paper is to examine the impact of total quality management practices on Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria and to identify the challenges encountered by the SME in adopting successful quality management programmes within their organization. Moreover, two hypotheses were tested using the spearman's rank correlation coefficient and the result revealed that total quality management practices have a significant effect on Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria and challenges encountered by the SME has lead to successful total quality management programmes within their organizations. The paper concludes that Quality management is focused not only on product/service quality, but also the means to achieve it Quality management, therefore uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Finally, the paper then recommends that Good quality management programmes should be in place in the organization to enable all the staffs to learn and undergo the process of quality management in their organization. Keyword: Quality Management Practice, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, Small Business Owner, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, Product/service quality, Quality Assurance, Management programme. I. Introduction In today"s world, organizations are facing the growing challenges from global competition and more sophisticated customers in terms of what they want and their changing needs. The ever increasing global competitive nature of the business environment has forced corporations to develop strategies to become low cost producers and to differentiate their goods and services from their competition. Through customer focused quality programmes, quality lowers the cost and will become a powerful product differentiation to customers. (Ajayi, 2013) In order to be successful, firms must view quality as an essential part of their strategic process. Quality is a term that carries important meaning to both producer and customer. In the global market place today, many organizations realized that its survival in the business world depend highly on producing high quality product and services. Indeed, a lot of organizations have emphasized that quality should have to be put in place, integrated within the management system, especially in terms of bringing the end products or services to the customers, especially with the intense competition arriving from the rivals. (Oluseye, 2014) Accordingly, quality management (QM) has become increasingly prevalent as one of the management strategies in ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, improving products and service quality and reinforcing continuous improvement. This paper is tailored along this line, and seeks to evaluate the level of awareness of quality management practices of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria. Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) are the life blood of modern economies. SMEs play a unique role in countries industrial development in terms of employment creation, income generation and ensuring equitable distribution of limited resources. Unfortunately, while an overwhelming percentage of Nigeria businesses are SMEs, the performance of the SME sector has remained dismal towards the drive for economic development and this has in turn contributed to low performance of larger businesses as well (Onugu, 2005) In Nigeria, the SME sector"s contribution has fallen short of its potential due largely to lack of effective quality management and coordinated effort to support SME"s operations. Most Nigerian SMEs struggle to operate, manage and improve their businesses efficiently in order to consistently deliver quality products and services on time (Osuagwu, 2008) Among the numerous challenges to increase performance and growth of most of these companies include quality management practices. That they should remain competitive and