Leading businesses identify customer satisfaction, cost savings and productivity improvements as the primary drives for their quality improvement initiatives, according to a new study from Best Practices LLC. Based on analyses from 46 major companies, the survey concludes that:

• There is a direct link between a company’s quality improvement and its quality program’s longevity. Forty-three percent of respondents from the benchmark class indicated that they have had their quality organizations in place for more than six years. The most quality awards went to companies that had quality organizations in place for more than 10 years.
• A global pharmaceutical company operating at 50 percent of its state capacity due to underperformance, unplanned downtime and rejects, applied variability reduction to its system and saw the number of units manufactured each day more than double over a one-year period.
• Sixty-five percent of the companies in the benchmark class developed a centralized function to drive quality internally.
• Fifty-nine percent of respondents have advance TQM initiatives beyond the implementation stage.

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