Born amidst a crisis, a 12 year old Total Quality Management effort at Bekaert, a European multi-national, resulted in changes to corporate philosophy and R&D management. It also introduced SPC, continuous improvement and production cells for knowledge creation in the factories. These led to two major European quality awards.
It demonstrates the difficulties of institutionalising TQM at the factory and corporate levels It raises issues of the nature of top management commitment, the need for internally consistent systems, the importance of human resource management, the explicit management of process knowledge and the changing nature of R&D It introduces the EFQM Quality Award criteria
