ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1990s has been characterized by extended, intensive global competition in the products and resources markets. Firms that concentrate their efforts solely on improving their technical and other operational efficiency will also fail. While the direction of change is clear, there are many different possible ways to organize the planned changes. In order to carry out and sustain the process of change, people also need to focus on the role of human resources. It is clear that systems, standards and technology themselves will not automatically result in continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. The basic problem facing this research was how to measure the effectiveness of the quality programmes implemented by the sample of firms. Objective measures, such as quality cost, cannot be used because the data is not available in most of the firms and, more importantly, quality cost can in fact be measured in various ways.
