Quality is the prerequisite for international competitiveness: Quality is the essential pre-requisite for gaining and maintaining
sustained competitive advantage and market presence in an interconnected world
where goods are sourced from around the world. Through safety, performance,
reliability and sustainability, quality is critical to export success.
Quality improves the
health and viability of SMEs sector: The health, viability and resilience of SMEs
is reinforced through good practices in quality. Thus growth of priority sectors and trade
depends to a very large extent on quality. Enterprises with sound quality
management are likely to be more innovative.
Quality affects
functions across the enterprise: It has implications throughout the operations
of a business, from strategy vis-à-vis competitors, market selection, sourcing,
packaging, to marketing and branding and plays a major role in growth and value
addition.
Challenges related to quality that prevent SMEs in
developing countries from participating effectively in international trade may
classified into two types:
1. Specific problems related to technical barriers to trade:
According to ITC research,
approximately 70% of problems faced by exporters due to non-tariff measures are
in the area of technical barriers to trade (TBT) and sanitary and phytosanitary
measures (SPS). Specifically SMEs face
obstacles to:
- find information about mandatory technical requirements
and voluntary standards applicable in the importing country;
- adapt their products to meet these requirements;
- demonstrate that the products meet the relevant
requirements; and
obtain the necessary support required at each step from national quality -
related and other institutions, due to a
weak quality infrastructure.
The proliferation and existence of a multitude of technical
requirements including conformity assessment procedures in different countries
creates difficulties for SMEs in particular,
who:
- Are unable to benefit from economies of scale;
- Incur additional costs from submitting their
products to the various conformity assessment procedures;
- Face difficulties and more costs to obtain
pertinent information; and
- Suffer from resulting unpredictability and
delays in time-to-market.
ITC’s quality management services designs systematic
interventions to address the technical
issues identified by NTM surveys.
2. General lack of a quality culture
SMEs in developing countries often
- lack information, orientation and resources in
understanding the key concepts of quality and
applying simple principles that may be applied;
- wrongly perceive that quality is expensive and
resource intensive;
- view quality improvement and certification
synonymously, and undertake the latter mainly as a marketing tool;
- narrow down quality to product feature/quality
with the involvement of a few persons responsible for the inspection and
verification of goods;
- have limited support from trade support
institutions and national standards bodies to
help enterprises understand, begin and implement the basic tenets of
quality, other than those purely related to Standards and Certification.
SMEs fail to address quality proactively from the early
stage in the design of SME operations, to serve as a foundation for success.
This leads to avoidable low quality of products, waste, high error rates,
reworks, down-times, delays, uncertainty and higher costs.
ITC’s quality
management services help SMEs to overcome these challenges. The services are
primarily through services channelled through national quality related
institutions and relevant trade support agencies.
Please email Khemraj Ramful, Senior Adviser, Export Quality Management (ramful@intracen.org), for more information