Challenges of Quality Management: A Case Study at Malaysian Electronics Manufacturing Services Company

The majority of Malaysian electronics manufacturing companies are electronics contract manufacturers (CM) and the industry is known as electronics manufacturing services (EMS). The industry is lucrative yet challenging. Companies in this industry need to have strong and flexible production system as well as supply chain to cater for diverse customer requirements such as high mix low volume demand. The objective of this paper is to identify the challenges in managing quality effectively and efficiently in a contract-manufacturing environment. Observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand and identify the operational problems in a local EMS company. The problems are then analyzed and generalized against existing quality theories. Interestingly, the findings showed that all the problems have been addressed in the quality theories some 30 years ago.