Designing a total quality management 4.0 framework for service organizations: a plan-do-study-act based approach

Abstract

This study aims to design a Total Quality Management 4.0 (TQM 4.0) framework for service organizations to enhance service quality and customer satisfaction using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) approach. The framework was evaluated through a case study in the airline industry, where service quality analysis identified online booking and online boarding as the weakest areas, supported by root cause analysis; the Economy class showed the lowest satisfaction level, at 8.37%, against an overall baseline satisfaction rate of 43.33%. Simulation-based evaluation showed that increasing the ease-of-online-booking and online-boarding scores from 2.61 to 3.14 to 3.41 and 3.74 (on a 5-point scale) raised Economy-class satisfaction to 11.51%, and this shift was assessed for internal consistency using statistical process control (SPC) applied to the simulated data. Because the framework was evaluated through simulation rather than real organizational implementation, the findings should be interpreted as indicative rather than conclusive. Additionally, a dashboard was developed to support continuous monitoring and data-driven decision making, illustrating the potential applicability of the proposed framework for continuous service improvement.