A Quality Management Framework for Seaports in their Supply Chains in the 21st Century

For seaports to be competitive and sustainable in the long-term in a turbulent and hyper-competitive market, a re-examination of success factors, organizational structures, and management practices is required. As seaports have continued to evolve and become further integrated and embedded in their supply chains, the issue of ensuring quality management practices becomes of greater interest.This paper argues that the seaport should implement relevant and appropriate internal and external quality management practices. The former emphasizes more internal-focused quality management practices relating directly to the seaport, while external quality management practices aim to facilitate the efficiency of supply chains in which the seaport is embedded as well as harmonizing the relationships with stakeholders. This paper takes a conceptual approach to these issues by comprehensively reviewing the extant literature and proposes a quality management framework for empirical validation containing eight internal and four external quality management practices for seaports in the twenty-first century.