QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN SUPPLY CHAINS: THE LITERATURE REVIEW

Supply chain management is used by most of the organizations worldwide, therefore the large number of studies has been done to explore this field. Moreover, its interlinking with the quality management perspective is still very limited. It is worth mentioning here that, in the present competitive world, the dynamics of market does not allow any deviation in quality of end product. Therefore, the importance of quality management is universally espoused by the researchers and practicing managers working in this area. It has been found by the authors that the focused approaches in evaluating quality management issues within inter and intra organization supply chain contexts are indispensable. During review of the open literature available in this area, the authors investigated that in present scenario there are number of quality related issues (either at the suppliers end or at manufacturers end) in supply chain management which needs immediate attention of the researchers. In this context the quality of supply chain itself can provide a path breaking solution at different levels of supply chain management. Moreover, this concept may be applied to address the problems such as product recall, delay in delivery of products etc. regardless of type of industry. In this paper, the authors have reported intensive studies based on the work carried out by various researchers in the area of supply chain management. Further, an attempt has also been made to identify conceptual interlinking between Supply chain management and Quality management through literature review.