Effects of business excellence drivers on firm performance in manufacturing industry

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1226353 (Table of Contents)

Improvement of firm performance has been an effective tool for firms to increase their competitiveness. Acceleration of technological developments, difficulty of customer satisfaction and very intense global competition have resulted in a hostile environment necessitating a dynamic change process. This process is indeed difficult to manage and Business Excellence has become one of the critical instruments for managers to secure survival. Defining Business Excellence, discovering its determinants, analyzing the status and characteristics of Business Excellence in Turkish manufacturing industry and measuring its effects on firm performance constitute the major objectives of this thesis. After an extensive literature review, technology and innovation tendency, human resources, process management and continuous improvement (CI), manufacturing structure and operations, planning, manufacturing strategy, customer focus, supplier relations and leadership are identified as Business Excellence determinants. The questionnaire is prepared by considering Business Excellence determinants and the questionnaires employed in previous studies. Our final sample size has reached 140 manufacturing firms. In the following step, employing the data gathered, analyses about relationship between Business Excellence determinants and general firm performance and financial indicators are performed. Factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, T-tests and structural equation modeling are selected as the appropriate methods for the analysis. Commercial software packages MS Excel, SPSS v13 and AMOS v4 are used.