~ 126 ~ ISSN Print: 2394-7500 ISSN Online: 2394-5869 Impact Factor: 5.2 IJAR 2016; 2(2): 126-134 www.allresearchjournal.com Received: 02-12-2015 Accepted: 04-01-2016 Jyoti Prakas Majumdar Professor, VIT Business School, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, Pin: 632014, India. Correspondence Jyoti Prakas Majumdar Professor, VIT Business School, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, Pin: 632014, India. Causes of reluctance of Indian manufacturing SMEs to implement Total quality management Jyoti Prakas Majumdar Abstract In the present scenario of highly competitive business environment in domestic as well as global market, implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM) concept has become an essential business culture and a key survival tool, both for manufacturing and service industries, from large scale to small scale, for achieving the business competitiveness. TQM has been adopted by a good number of large scale industries. However, negligible units of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) has adopted TQM. Especially in developing countries like India, though SMEs play an important role in the economic growth of the country, SMEs are still reluctant to adopt TQM. Many Indian SMEs, under the pressure from the customer, have set up suitable QMS (Quality Management System) for getting ISO 9001 certification leading to Quality Assurance, but have not adopted TQM. As such, understanding the causes behind their reluctance in TQM implementation has become very important. In this review paper a number of literatures on the study on the Critical Factors for successful implementation of TQM and the causes responsible for reluctance of the SME in adopting TQM. The result will encourage and guide the future research to remove or reduce the difficulties of SMEs in implementing TQM to achieve the business excellence. Keywords: Total Quality Management; TQM; Small and Medium Enterprise; SME; Quality Management System; Quality Assurance. 1. Introduction During the past few decades, both the large scale manufacturing industries and SMEs are facing dramatic changes in the business environment, like increase of consumer awareness regarding quality and cost, rapid advancement of technology, globalization of business, etc. As a result, the major challenges faced by the manufacturing industry is ‘quality improvement’ in addition to the inherent ‘cost competitiveness’ and ‘in-time delivery’ (Arumugam et al., 2009) [4] . To address the challenges being faced by the industries in today’s highly competitive business scenario, TQM has become the key survival tool and an essential business culture for all the industries – both large industries and SMEs. TQM philosophy has been successfully adopted by all most all large manufacturing industries. However, it is also true that SMEs are still reluctant to adopt TQM, though SMEs play a vital role in the economic growth of the country, particularly in all developing countries like India (Singh, 2011) [42] . A good number of manufacturing SMEs are working as the supplier of the large scale manufacturing industries. So, they are becoming the part of bigger supply chains and the quality of their products also becomes significantly important and they will not be able to achieve competitive success if they do not become quality conscious. They should have suitable Statistical Quality Control (SQC) system at the first stage, then effective Quality Management System (QMS) for Quality Assurance at the second stage and Total Quality Management (TQM) at the final stage for continuous Quality Improvement to improve the customer satisfaction, leading to increased competitiveness and improved business performance of the organization (Singh et al., 2010) [43] . Many manufacturing SME have implemented the Quality Management System (QMS) for Quality Assurance, in ISO 9001 certification, but very few of them have so far adopted TQM. They are also not fully aware that QMS as established in having ISO 9001 certification can be an effective step towards TQM implementation (Mo and Chan, 1997; Yusof and Aspinwall, 2000) [34, 56] . International Journal of Applied Research 2016; 2(2): 126-134