Copyright © 2018 Satyabrata Aich et. al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (3.29) (2018) 130-133 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research paper A novel approach to identify the best practices of quality management in SMES based on critical success factors using interpretive structural modeling (ISM) Satyabrata Aich 1 *, Kamalakanta Muduli 2 , Md. Mehedi Hassan Onik 1 , Hee-Cheol Kim 1 1 Department of Computer Engineering/IDA, Inje University, Gimhae, South Korea 2 Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea *Corresponding author E-mail: satyabrataaich@gmail.com Abstract In recent years, most small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) worldwide looking for improvement in their business practices in order to gain competitive advantage and total quality management(TQM) as a means by which SMEs could achieve the desired result. The objective of this study is to discover the critical success factors that are affecting the quality management practices in SMEs. In this work eight factors were identified through the literature review and experts from academic as well as industries. The factors are commitment to quality, employee involvement, customer focus, information technology, improved production planning and control, recognition system, supplier quality management, and management vision and mission. Interpretive structural modeling(ISM) is used to understand the com- plex relationships among the factors and classify the factors into various categories as per the driving and the dependence capacity. The result shows that information technology (IT) is a key success factor for implementing TQM in SMEs. It is observed that SMEs have to increase the use of IT to improve the quality of the product and productivity. Keywords: Total Quality Management; SME; It; Critical Success Factor 1. Introduction In recent years the demand of the small and medium scale enter- prises touched to a new height because of the development of tech- nology that makes it easier to connect to the big industries which indirectly increase the amount of contribution towards the economy across the world. According to the latest report of 2017 Indian SMEs contributes around 45% towards the total manufacturing out- put,40% towards the export, and 8% towards GDP of the country [1]. The effect of globalization changes the perspective of total quality management in such a way that every industry would like implement total quality management to improve the performance across sectors in SMEs as well as in big industries [2]. Indian Ce- ment Industry has shown positive effect because of effective imple- mentation of the TQM [3]. It is important to understand the signif- icance of critical factors of TQM for the success of Indian automo- bile industries. The failure of TQM practices happens because of deficiency of understanding of the complex relationships among the key factors [4]. The implementation level of TQM in Indian manu- facturing industries is low, but the level of awareness is high [5]. Implementation of TQM has shown positive impact on Indian ser- vice Industries [6]. ISM is easy to use and widely used approach for most of the complex situation [7]. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 represents the past work related to the factors affecting TQM in a tabular form and Section 3 describes about the methodology. The Questionnaire survey has been discussed in Sec- tion 4 and Section 5 focuses Interpretive Structural Modeling Ap- proach. MICMAC analysis has been carried out in Section 6 and section 7 presents the ISM model. Section 8 and 9 discusses the results of MICMAC analysis and conclusion drawn based on ISM respectively. 2. Literature review The critical success factors are identified from the previous litera- ture and presented in Table 1. Table 1: Critical Success Factors for TQM Identified by Previous Research- ers