Detection of the quality and system certification information of and related problems encountered by enterprises: A study on export production enterprises in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia regions

This study is based on the question: ?What is the source of the problems encountered by the export production enterprises in quality and system certification processes and implementations? Taking this question as a basis, a basic hypothesis has been developed as: ?Source of the problems encountered by the export production enterprises in quality and system certification processes and implementations is that managers lack sufficient level of information.?.. The aim of this study can be summarized as, ?To detect the factors effective on obtaining the standard documents required for foreign trade by enterprises; to detect the problems they experience in the process of obtaining these documents and; to develop solutions for these problems?. Considering that only a small number of academic studies have been conducted on the certification problems encountered by industrialists, this study is of importance since it will present these certification problems to legislators and implementers.The scope of the study is composed of the export production enterprises operating in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia Regions. The reason behind the selection of these two regions is that they are the least developed regions of Turkey. This study, therefore, can contribute to the lessening of the development gap between these two regions in comparison to western regions.Data obtained in the scope of this study show that enterprises have quality awareness; that the awareness is an artificial awareness that has not been adopted at a sufficient level; that quality awareness can not be sufficiently reflected into implementation due to this superficiality; and that one of the results of this superficiality is the fact that enterprises can not exert required efforts to overcome unawareness and other similar problems. In addition, it is understood from the obtained data that despite the high-level importance attached to quality and certification, export experience and export expansion areas are limited; that certification is a new issue for the region as it has been, on average, 5 years since it has been introduced; that certification has only a ?low-level? increasing effect on export sales; that this situation seems contrary to the idea that ?standards constitute common language of the international trade?; and that all of these are the results of unawareness and not giving required importance to this issue.Since the findings obtained seem to support the basic hypothesis, the basic hypothesis is thought to be acceptable.KEY WORDS: Quality, Standardization, Quality and System Certification, Foreign Trade, Export, SME, Lack of Information