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Over the past decade Hilti (Gt. Britain) Ltd tried a number of quality initiatives to improve product delivery and service. The implementation of TQM in 1990 has produced a single‐minded focus on the customer. This article traces the company's journey towards total quality.

To analyze the main elements of continuous improvement (CI) in higher education and the concerns of academia's stakeholders in the implementation of such an approach. Suggests guidelines for the development of a culture more receptive to the implementation and maintenance of a CI approach in higher education.

A review of published literature (1982‐2004) facilitates identification of elements of CI, and concerns of academia's stakeholders for the adoption of a CI approach in higher education. The reviewed sources are grouped into three major sections: the CI approach, implications of CI, and an illustrative example – EQUIS.

The adoption of a CI approach in higher education requires not only upper administration commitment, but also uncovering the current underlying culture and examining the appropriateness of the objectives to adopt CI. A culture of a long‐term commitment to CI implies engaging the administrative and academic systems and all the stakeholders of the institution. This was identified as a major road‐block for quality initiatives.

There is a wide range of stakeholders to consider and some stakeholders have diverse objectives in pursuing a CI approach. Future research should explore these agendas to identify core issues needing to be addressed to speed up the shift towards a CI culture.

Required accreditations in colleges and universities offer an increasingly important role to a CI approach in higher education and its impact on academic stakeholders.

This paper fulfils an identified information/resources need and offers practical help to colleges of business seeking accreditations and institutions of higher education pursuing CI initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a new framework for continuous improvement.

The literature review on customer value and strategic quality provides the basis for the identification of a conceptual framework for continuous improvement. This conceptual framework is validated using the in-depth interview and the survey approach.

The empirical study concluded that the new framework contains all the core components or forces of continuous improvement. These forces are customer value focused co-leadership, customer value focused strategic objectives, improvement specialists with people performance knowledge and improvement methodology. By adopting this framework, all process personnel can have a role to play in process improvement leading to increased organisational returns on investment. Overall, it is an effective framework that is easily understood and can be applied throughout any process led organisation. This is supported by the empirical data.

This new framework can demonstrate to each organisational employee where they fit into the organisational continuous improvement strategy. This paper provides practitioners with a new validated continuous improvement framework that has application in all organisations that are involved in process customer value improvement. The researchers contend that this new framework can compliment existing continuous improvement frameworks.

This paper develops and validates a new framework for continuous improvement. By adopting this framework, all process personnel can have a role to play in process improvement leading to increased organisational returns on investment. This is supported by the empirical data. Also, the authors contend that this framework embraces the systems thinking approach (Conti, 2010) or systemic approach as people interact with customers, processes, improvement methodologies and each other to drive customer value improvement. Consequently, this generates a need to take global view of the combined effect of all customer value improvement components. This systems thinking can feed into future research.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how hotels are implementing customer relationship management (CRM) practices at the property level.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 45 hotel managers from 17 hotels. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using content analysis.

All participating hotels have practices in place to manage customer relationships. The most commonly cited goal for CRM is guest retention. Evaluation and control are perceived as very important activities not only to create value for the customers, but also to track the performance of the guest contact departments and the customers' evaluations of the hotel/restaurant experiences.

The sample is probably biased towards hotels that are most interested in CRM and are heavily weighted towards higher tariff properties.

The study modified Buttle's CRM value chain to analyze hotels' CRM practices. Results of the study provide a source for industry practitioners to compare and benchmark their practices and to obtain useful CRM ideas.

CRM‐related research in the hotel industry has looked at a variety of specific practices and its role in achieving overall objectives at the corporate strategic level. Yet, no research has been done to investigate CRM practices at the property level for hotels using the CRM value chain.

Part II of a three‐part series, presents a comprehensive review of the literature by discussing critical factors of TQM in key areas often stressed in implementation case studies, and supported by quality gurus and writers. Such factors are considered as being conducive to the success of TQM implementation. Discusses these factors from the point of view of how and why. There appears to be little agreement on the what, so an understanding of the “processes” involved in implementation allows for the appropriate framing and objective classification of key factors for TQM implementation. Discusses those quality factors related to resource management and systems and process management.

Provides two definitions of TQM which address TQM critical factors. Also examines a number of self‐assessment frameworks and explains the role they play in determining the TQM critical factors.

Represents a comprehensive review of the literature by discussing critical factors of TQM in key areas often stressed in implementation case studies, and supported by quality gurus and writers. Such factors are considered as being conducive to the success of TQM implementation. Discusses these factors from the point of view of how and why. There appears to be little agreement on the what, so an understanding of the “processes” involved in implementation allows for the appropriate framing and objective classification of key factors for TQM implementation. Part I discusses quality factors related to: leadership; internal stakeholders’ management; policy and strategy. In all, 98 examples of best practice are referred to, to illustrate how the various critical fields of TQM have successfully been put in place.

The use of ceramic instead of metallic parts in devices that operate in aggressive conditions increases the service life of machines and equipment for chemical, metallurgical and other industries. The wear resistant zirconia/alumina composites were sintered from nanopowders obtained by co-precipitation technique. In the case of addition of 1wt% of alumina in zirconia ceramics the wear resistance increased by approximately 30%.

The formation of complex multilevel composite structures, such as Al³⁺ ion segregation on zirconia grain boundaries and intracrystalline alumina inclusions in zirconia grains, increased the fracture toughness values of composites obtained from co-precipitated nanopowders and consequently decreased the volume loss of ceramic material.

In this study, we investigated the effect of nanopowders synthesis methods and alumina concentration on composite structure, fracture toughness and tribological behavior of 3Y-TZP/alumina ceramic composites and searched correlation between structures and mechanical properties.

The brief announcement that the Government had accepted that there should be regulations on open date marking of food, to come into effect in 1975, will come as no surprise. It is a timely reminder of what public pressure can achieve these days; how sustained advocacy and publicity by interested sectors of society—magistrates, local authorities, public health workers, consumer groups—can secure legislative changes which, in this case, run counter to trade opinions and the recommendation originally made by the Food Standards Committee that such a proposal was not practical and the existing law was an adequate protection. This was stated in the FSC Report on Food Labelling of 1964, although there was no indication of the evidence reviewed or that the subject had been considered very deeply; it was, after all, only a small fraction of the problem of food labelling control. It was also stated in this Report that in certain cases, date‐stamping of food could give to purchasers a false sense of security, “not justified by the conditions under which the food has been kept since manufacture”.