STATE OF THE ART CONCERNING THE INTEGRATION OF METHODS AND TECHNIQUES IN QUALITY MANAGEMENT â•fi LITERATURE REVIEW AND AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH

Quality management is becoming more and more important for the manufacturing as well as the service industry. In the last couple of years manifold approaches for quality management have been developed such as Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean Management or KAIZEN for example. The increasing variety of quality management methods leads to challenges for quality managers since enterprises often use several approaches in parallel. Integration becomes a mean in handling this variety of methods and can lead to valuecreating synergies. Nevertheless, integration in quality management is a poorly understood discipline yet. The main problem is a lack of guidelines, helping a practitioner in integrating heterogeneous approaches in a value-creating and systematic way. This paper approaches the complexity of the topic by taking a closer look at existing efforts concerning the integration of quality management methods and techniques. Based on the findings a research agenda is derived.