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In this article The TQM Magazine profiles the 1990 US Malcolm Baldrige winners. All four winners, Federal Express, Cadillac, IBM Rochester, and Wallace, have one common goal — increasing customer satisfaction.

The relationship between the size of state audit budgets, audit responsibilities, professional characteristics of staff, risk, and tax and expenditure limitations is explored. Bivariate relationships are examined and then a model is estimated which controls for size, complexity, financial risk factors, and political risk factors. This provides a framework for considering the incremental influence of specialized audit inputs. Both "brand names" and size have been used in past research to proxy for quality dimensions intended to differentiate the audit product provided by different suppliers. This research extends such work by considering characteristics of the auditing services as reflected by specific inputs and by using cost data rather than audit fee data. The states are observed to differ in their responses to financial and political factors by spending resources on peer review, continuing professional education, certifications of professional staff, and expertise in both the computer science area and in law. A positive association of cost and auditor differentiation, implicit in past audit fee literature is corroborated.

John Wallace, engineering director at Lamberton Robotics, outlines an unusual robotics application his company has designed for a French forging plant

People are management's most important asset, and in no other industry is this more true than in retail distribution. Not only is it highly labour intensive but, with the addition of the crucial role played by the consumer, the question of human relations becomes of paramount importance. This special feature is therefore concerned with various aspects of people at work. Firstly, Dr Olive Robinson and Mr John Wallace have written the first of a series of articles dealing with current questions of wage payment and employment in the distributive trades. Following on this Mr M.F. Hall reports on a pilot study, undertaken in a department store, which examines the output of selling staff and assesses their effectiveness. Finally, three writers from the Institute of Manpower Studies (concerned with improving the management of human resources in industry), describe how they set about a study of the manpower situation in distribution, a commission offered them by the DITB.