Total Quality Management Practices And Operational Performance Of Nairobi Bottlers Limited, Kenya

The beverage sector in Kenya has consistently been characterized by persistent operational inefficiency and poor customer services. In order to address the problems of inefficiency in service delivery these organizations are fast adopting quality management in order to make them effective in meeting public demands. The beverage sector in the entire world is getting competitive every day due to the changes in technology and quality issues. In order to be successful in quality service delivery quality management practices ought to be the integral part of any organization’s strategic management. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of quality management practices on the performance of beverage sector in Kenya. The specific objectives of the study were to investigate the effect of continuous improvement, customer focus and organisational commitment on operational performance of Nairobi Bottlers Limited in Nairobi, Kenya. The study was anchored on theory of quality management and resource based view theory. The target population was the 425 employees of Nairobi bottlers limited at the company headquarters in Nairobi and a sample of 20% was selected making 85 respondents. The study relied on data collected through open and closed ended questionnaire to meet the objectives of the study using five point Likert scale. The questionnaire focused on the total quality management practices implementation and operational performance of the company. The process of data analysis involved data clean up, explanation and responses in the questionnaires were tabulated, coded and analysed using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 20.0. The results were presented in form of tables, pie charts and bar graphs. It was realized that management commitment, customer focus and continuous improvement had a positive relationship with operational performance and a correlation coefficient close to 1. The management commitment was found to be lower while customer focus was above average and continuous improvement was also significant. The study recommends that the firm needs to involve employees in decision making leading to improvement of operational performance.