Quality management for seaports integrated in supply chains: exploring the views of seaport executives

Mergers and integration are an undeniable development tendency of current existing business firms and organisations. This derives from increasingly competitive international business and an uncertain financial environment. To be sustainable, organisations must now consider operating as part of a network chain rather than in isolation. Seaports are no exception. Over the years, seaport development has evolved through various generations to now become an integral part of supply chains. This involves however, providing higher quality products and services with lower costs if they are to gain larger market share. One means of achieving this is by implementing quality management due to its proven ability as an economical means of achieving long term sustainable competitive advantage and superior performance. Although there are many comprehensive studies on quality management applied across various sectors of industry, there is a paucity of quality management research in relation to seaports. Of the little research available, it tends to focus on internal quality systems often related to the International Organization for Standardization, that is, the ISO series. Of greater interest however, is that given the changing role of seaports and their integration within supply chains, whether quality management in seaports is also continuing its evolution to become both an internal and external focus expanding along the supply chains in which 21st century seaports operate. Thus, the objective of this paper is to explore quality management principles and factors that are critical for the successful performance of modem day seaports and their supply chains. The paper is constructed as follows. TI1e first section introduces the topic of quality management and the research objectives. Section two provides a comprehensive review of the extant literature on quality management within the context of both supply chains and seaports, and argues that that quality management must be viewed from a wider perspective to include how quality is managed across the supply chains in which seaports operate. Section three explains that as a result of the literature review, a conceptual model is developed consisting of twelve major practices of quality management deemed critical to the success of seaport performance in the supply chain context. The next section discusses the research methodology of an empirical study on Vietnamese seaports to obtain senior seaport managers' views on the importance of practices and attributes of quality management for seaports in supply chain context. Key results and findings are presented and discussed subsequently, followed by a conclusion and recommendations for a broader approach to quality management for seaports and their supply chains.