Pareto analysis of critical success factors of total quality management: A literature review and analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this literature review is to identify and propose a list of few vital critical success factors (CSFs) of total quality management (TQM) for the benefit of researchers and industries.Design/methodology/approach – Even though there has been a large number of articles published related to TQM in the last few decades, only a very few articles focused on documenting the CSFs of TQM using statistical methods. The main objective of this literature review is to investigate and list the CSFs of TQM according to the descending order of frequencies of occurrences. The domain of review is the scale development studies and the TQM effect versus performance measurement studies. The review period is between 1989 and 2003. Rigorous statistical reliability tests and validity tests were conducted during these studies to factorize the CSFs and hence these studies were chosen for the literature review. Finally, the quality tool “Pareto analysis” was used to sort and arrange the CSFs according to the ...