An ANP-Balanced Scorecard Methodology to Quantify the Impact of TQM Elements on Organisational Strategic Sustainable Development: Application to an Oil Firm

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for quantifying the impact of Total Quality Management TQM elements on organisational strategic sustainable development, integrating within it the well-known strategic management tool of Balanced Scorecard to represent the strategic part of the organisations, and the multi-criteria technique Analytic Network Process (ANP) to identify and quantify the mentioned impact. Additionally, the application of TQM generates directly some organisational improvements—or outputs—which help model a decisional ANP network constituted by all three building blocks—TQM elements, strategic objectives and outputs—and their interrelationships. The application of the methodology to an oil firm carried out by an expert group offered, from a decision-making point of view, meaningful results that were developed following three different analyses: Global analysis, which identified the global weight of each variable; Analysis of Influences, which established sound cause–effect relationships between the variables to identify the elements—TQM and outputs—that are more important to achieve the strategic objectives; and the Integrated analysis, which pointed out which TQM elements should be fostered in order to achieve the most important sustainable strategic objectives. Finally, it is suggested to apply the methodology to other types of size and sector activity organisations, as well as to use other techniques that introduce fuzzy elements.