The Empirical Study On Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Quality Management And Performance In Chongqing Manufacturing Industry Context

In present enterprises, the runners begin to pay more attention to competitive capabilities due to huge market pressure. Only the enterprise's competitive capability is enhanced, can the enterprise operate healthily in the market. The advancement of technology level is important part of the enhancement of enterprise's competitive capability. Likewise, quality management plays a very important role in pushing enterprise's competitive capability because it is major content of enterprise operation. Since the conception of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT in short hereinafter) is raised, the runners of enterprises purse new technologies so much. But in reality the application of AMT cannot always improve the enterprise's performance, people feel so puzzled about the application of AMT. Therefore, more and more managers and researchers start to focus on the relationship between AMT application and enterprise management practices and do study on them. Actually, this study is one part of a joint project on enterprise operations management between Hong Kong Chinese University and Chongqing University. My supervisor is in charge of this project. The findings in this paper are the early result of that project.In this paper, we study the relationship among AMT, quality management and performance. Such kind of study is now rare in the field of operations management in china and it has great meaning of initiation. We hope our result can be useful for future studies and we can give some study directions in this field. We use structural equation modeling mainly in this paper to analyze. The sample is Chongqing manufacturing enterprises. After doing two-stage study, i.e. pilot study and large sample study, and testing the reliability and the validity of variables in this paper, we conclude that level of AMT has positive impacts on level of quality management and level of quality management has positive impacts on enterprise performance. Although level of AMT has no positive impacts on enterprise performance, it has indirect effects on enterprise performance through the mediating function of quality management. We also discuss the relationship between AMT and the dimensions of quality management. The results show that AMT has positive impacts on all dimensions of quality management. Finally, we discuss infrastructure practices and core practices of quality management practices. We find that Chongqing manufacturing enterprises' quality management practices are similar in content with foreign studies results although it cannot be divided into infrastructure practices and core practices. According to above findings, we give some suggestions to Chongqing manufacturing enterprises on quality management. The contributions of this study lie in that we put forward a set of index to measure AMT, quality management and performance in empirical study. It may be useful in future study.