Alignment between a firm’s Quality Management System and its strategic objectives

The present paper discusses the results of a research project aiming at evaluating the extent to which the improvement projects of a company are actually supporting the company strategy and contributing to its achievement. In particular the paper presents a mathematical model supporting companies in assessing the alignment between the company’s declared strategy and the real effort (in terms of invested resources) in quality related programs. The model requires three input parameters: the number of critical success factors to consider, a vector representing the weights of the success factors and a vector representing the efforts made to improve each of the factors. The output of the model is a synthetic indicator of the company’s strategic alignment. The adoption of such a model can suggest improvement actions and provide useful information in the benchmarking of specific industrial sectors. The paper will illustrate an application of the model on a group of companies in the wood and furniture sector in Northern Italy.