EFQM mofel at the asseessing the establisment's success and a practice

SUMMARY Today, most of the companies want to sustain success in their business and maintain their survivability. The companies operate in a highly dynamic and uncertain environments. To become successful has a vital importance for them. To achieve the required level of success and satisfaction, everybody in the organisation should understand the same thing about the concept of "success". Based on this concept, a series of success factors for the company in question need to be defined taking the sector into account. Once the factors are known, the management should concentrate on them to achieve the success rather than spending efforts to others in seeking the success. Once the success and related factors are defined, the success targets should be set out and shared by the all employees of the organisation including the management levels. Some techniques such as total quality management need to be effectively employed to achieve the pre-defined targets. In order to measure the level of success after the implementations of the techniques as identified by the company for its success, So called EFQM Quality Model of European Foundation of Quality management (EFQM) could be used. EFQM model is developed in order to sustain quality of services and products in an organisation. EFQM presents 9 criterion for this purpose. Each criteria in turn has its own sub criterion. Through self assessment studies, it is possible to measure how these criterion are employed in the organisation and it is also possible to define the areas to be improved. However, Although they employ TQM, some companies could not achieve the success and can not bring the quality into their products and services. One of the main reasons for this is not to generate a common understanding of the concepts such as target and success among the employees. It is now obvious that preventing the confusion of concepts in an organisation is extremely important for sustaining success and living with change. In this thesis, especially, the concept of success investigated and the effect of total quality management activities on the success of an organisation studied. IXIn this study, an assessment of total quality management activities in the company mentioned above is performed taking EFQM business excellence model criterion. The results of the assessment are explained in detail in the thesis including weaknesses and strengths of the company especially concentrating on the areas to be improved. The thesis also highlights possible future work following this study.