Total quality of supply chain management.

In today's business, companies must make use of the resources of their whole supply chains to be successful in the intensely competitive market place. Therefore, supply chain management (SCM) has become a useful and strategic tool for companies to achieve competitive advantage.Many SCM studies focus on the information flow and material flow between organisations and their suppliers. They do not have a holistic view of SCM with little emphasis on parameters such as culture, quality, relationship and process factors. This study develops a more comprehensive SCM model which can help organisations better manage their supply chains and achieve business excellence. Since Total Quality Management (TQM) principles are useful in helping companies achieve business excellence, they should also be able to help companies' supply chains achieve business excellence. Hence, the study utilises TQM principles to enrich the existing SCM model and form the new Supply Chain Management Excellence (SCME) Model.The study was conducted in Hong Kong which offers a good Asian setting for the study of the western concepts of TQM and SCM. Data were collected from supply chain managers of 139 companies. Structural equation modeling was used to develop the new SCM structural model. EQS programme was employed to test the Goodness of Fit of the new SCM model. Once the theorised model has been tested to fit with the data in the study, indices for the application of SCM success factors and companies' overall performance for the 139 companies are calculated by the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method using the SAS programme. The same procedure was also applied to a construction company to further validate the Model at the company level. Findings of this study indicate that the new SCM model fits with the data of the 139 companies and the construction company very well. The Model is valid and useful for companies to achieve business excellence through supply chain management and thus the development of the Model contributes to supply chain management research. The study also contributes to TQM research by extending TQM principles from the company's level to the business-to-business level of companies and their suppliers.The Supply Chain Management Excellence Index generated by the SCME Model serves as an objective and comprehensive single measure of organisational effectiveness, and can be used for purposes of comparison across companies. Companies can use this Model to self assess their strengths and weaknesses on success factors for supply chain management and develop improvement plans. Moreover, the study offers a valuable database for future benchmarking exercises on supply chain management.