current issues

Current Issue Assignment This current issue aim to examine the relationship between the practices of soft quality management and hard quality management. Moreover, this study also aims to investigate the direct and indirect effects of soft and hard quality management. From this case, quality gurus suggest that quality management is the key to the improvement of performance (Deming, 1982; Juran, 1988). Quality management practices can be classified into two groups which are the management system call soft quality management, and the technical system call hard quality management. Now I explain the technical system. Firstly, technical system which is hard quality management consists a sets of tools and techniques such as control charts, pareto charts, histograms, scatter diagrams, flow charts and many more (Evans and Lindsay 1999). Technical system also includes production and work process control techniques which ensure the correct functioning of processes such as the process design, ISO 9000 standard and basic quality control tools (Wilkinson et al 1998). Secondly, the management system which is soft quality management is the behavioural aspects of management or the human aspects, such as leadership and people management. So, I conclude that hard quality management is a set of tools and system that necessary for the implementation of quality management principles. For example, control chart is a graph use to monitor process quality. Besides, soft quality management is more on managing people likes employee involvement, employee training or teamwork. Leadership skills, customers and supplier relationship, strategic planning, top management, fact-base decision making also consider as soft quality management. From this case, four hypotheses have been created to test the direct and indirect effects between soft quality and hard quality management. First hypothesis is soft quality management factors have positive direct effects on hard quality management.