Critical Factors for Iso 9001 Critique

Critique "Critical factors for effective implementation of ISO 9001 in SME service companies", (Psomas at al. 2010, p. 440-457)

Introduction The paper in review is part of the Journal “Managing Service Quality” which was published in 2010. At the time of publication the authors were researching for the University of Ioannina in Greece1 (Psomas, et al., 2010, p. 457). Evangelos Psomas was a Research Assistant and received a PhD in Total Quality Management (TQM) in 2008 (Psomas, et al., 2010, p. 457). Christos Fotopoulos is a fulltime Professor (University of Ioannina, 2012) and Dimitrios Kafetzopoulos was a PhD candidate for Food Quality Management (Psomas, et al., 2011a, p. 460). All authors have TQM as research interests in common (Psomas, et al., 2011b, p. 251) and have published several papers in Quality Management in the past four years. According to the literature review this study responds to Psomas, et al. (2010, p. 441) observation that critical success factors require constant re-investigation.

Summary

The paper is reviewing ISO 9001:2000 implementations in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Greece’s services sector with the purpose to assess critical factors for effective implementation of the ISO2 standard. The study is a deductive approached (Saunders, et al., 2009, p. 61) quantitative research defined by a random sample of 300 out of approximately 1000 ISO certified companies been selected for an e-mail survey. The survey is limited to quality managers whereof 93 responded to rate the importance of predefined critical factors on a seven-point Likert-type scale. Results of the research enlist 22 factors from most critical to least important followed by a factor analysis (Bryman & Bell, 2011, p. 170) concluding five critical areas for effectively implementing ISO 9001, in descending order of importance:
“# internal motivation
# attributes of company
# employee attributes
# requirements of the quality system
# attributes of the

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