Achieving Performance by Balancing Quality Improvement & Cost Reduction

The emergence of Knowledge Economy and globalization has pushed the businesses into a new paradigm. The concept of organizational performance excellence solely based on TQM Philosophy is no longer valid in international businesses and needs to be improved. The ever increasing global competition is forcing organizations for cost reduction on one hand and enhanced quality on the other. This dilemma faced by the organizations is difficult to solve. It is argued that mixed practices based on the philosophies of TQM and KM and their synchronization is necessary to achieve performance excellence in organizations. The current research endeavored to determine the common grounds between TQM and KM philosophies for their synchronization. The review of literature identifies four common enablers for TQM and KM namely Leadership, Training and Development, Customer focus and Corporate Culture with respect to performance excellence, using these common enablers a conceptual framework is proposed that can be used by organizations to obtain the benefits of both philosophies.