Effect of total quality management practices on operational performance of food manufacturing firms in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Total Quality Management (TQM) has availed to operations management key practices for measuring corporate performance in today's rapidly evolving environment. As a result food industries are adopting TQM practices to manage their operations for competitive advantage as well as improved operational performance. Previous studies have shown the importance of organizational performance, very few empirical examinations have been done on effect of TM on Operational performance. The overall objective of this work was to examine the outcome of the implementation of TQM practices on operational performance of Food and Beverages manufacturing industries in Nairobi. Both Explanatory and Cross sectional study designs were adopted to study the connection between TQM practices implementation and operational performance. The target population comprised large food manufacturing firms in Nairobi which are subdivided into 7 subsectors. A Survey of all the 87 firms was used in the study. Primary data was collected using a questionnaire. The respondents were managers involved in the operations management of the organization. To summarize the data, descriptive statistics such as Mean and Standard deviation were used. Cross tabulation was used to bring out the actual response by the various firms. The data was analyzedwith the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 20.0). To examine the relationship between TQM implementation and Operational performance, Pearson’s product-moment correlation analysis was used. To examine the effect of TQM implementation on operational performance; multiple regression analysis was used. The results revealed a significant positive relationship between TQM implementation and operational performance. The first, second and fourth null hypothesis were rejected, we fail to reject the third and the fifth null hypothesis. The findings also revealed that among all TQM practices, Top management commitment had the strongest relationship with operational performance. The results also showed that the joint effect of TQM practices operational performance was significant. The researcher recommends replication of the study in different sectors and countries to enhance understanding of the relationship between TQM implementation and operational performance. The study is significant as it will provide the management of Food and beverage firms with information on how to implement total quality management on operational performance.