1. In today's market, quality is becoming increasingly important.
It is only through the
pursuit of high-quality products and services that a high level of international competitiveness can be achieved. This paper examines the relationship between quality and competitive advantage from the perspective of strategic management accounting, based on the value chain theory, and highlights how the quality and value chains are intertwined in the operation chain. Enterprises can optimize procurement costs by analyzing the upstream value chain; enterprises can optimize product life-cycle costs and improve customer satisfaction by analyzing the downstream value chain.
2. Because of the diversity of the countries in Asia, multinationals face challenges in
implementing productivity improvement programs. From 1996 to 2000, a comparative study on quality management (QM) was conducted in nine Asian countries. The goal of the study was to figure out what was causing these issues. A standardized pretested questionnaire was used to collect data under controlled conditions. The influence of regional/country and microfactors on the evolution of quality management practices into more sophisticated forms (TQM and beyond) was investigated.