The role of total quality management on the performance of small and medium enterprises:

Abstract

The study or the research aimed at establishing the role of total quality management on the performance of small and medium enterprises. The study objectives included: to access the effect customer focus on the performance of small and medium enterprises, to determine the effect of team work on the performance of the enterprises, to determine the influence of benchmarking on the performance of the enterprises. The major objective of the study was to establish the role of total quality management on the performance of small and medium enterprises in Uganda. However despite the solutions applied by the government and different workshops such as provision of youth loans and ways of managing them, public lectures on improvement of quality in the goods and services produced by the small and medium enterprises there is persistent occurrences of financial problems exhibited in high indebtedness, loss of customers and unstable profitability levels in different industries, therefore this study seeks to show the role of total quality management on the performance of small and medium enterprises. This study was carried out in mukono municipality, at ridar hotel using a descriptive research design. Simple random sampling was used to select the respondents. A total of 44 respondents comprising mostly of employees and managers of the enterprise were selected to participate in the survey and a statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse data. The findings were presented using frequency tables, pie charts and histogram. The study revealed that ridar hotel had a culture put in place and directed to total quality management for success of the enterprise. The study showed that the respondents were fully aware of achieving customer satisfaction and in turn knew the benefits of customer satisfaction and how it pleased the customers. The study showed a strong need and support for team work in the enterprise, with a view that it increased the productivity of the employee their by leading to improved performance of the enterprise. Lastly the study showed that an enterprise can not operate in isolation, naturally it has got competitors, therefore to successfully co exist the tools of benchmarking had to be used acquire the useful attributes of their competitors to favourly compete. This was shown by overwhelming desire to borrow useful attributes. Conclusively, the researcher discovered that the dimensions of total quality management such as customer focus, teamwork and benchmarking to a greater extent affected the performance of an enterprise. In addition, the researcher was of a view that the enterprise do adopt and put in use all the dimensions of total quality management because this would greatly improve their performance against their competitors