Abstract:
In recent years, frozen food demands especially seafood consumption is increasing due to the high growth of populations worldwide and the change to rush lifestyle of convenience food. Thailand with technology and a long-time experience in producing food is one of the global major suppliers in frozen seafood industry but frozen seafood exports are slowdown. Quality and price are competitive advantages of Thai suppliers; hence adoption of management tools is crucial. Thai frozen seafood factory only realized benefits from the famous management tools such as TQM, Six Sigma and Lean. Lack of knowledge in other management tools, its application, and its benefits may hinder the companies opportunity for improving their operations. Hence this paper aims to study current status of management tools usage in Thai frozen industry and provide much useful information such as benefits of each management tool, and future improvement agenda together with the companys adoption of management tool plan. Questionnaire survey has been sent to 130 Thai frozen seafood manufacturers and 74 responses. 57% of the respondents are large Thai seafood factories with shrimp products. Top executives are key decision makers in management tools adoption. HACCP (86.3%), ISO9000 series (56.16%) and 5S (58.9%) are the present most used tools in Thai frozen seafood industries. Moreover, ISO9000 series (38.1%), benchmark (35.1%), and lean production (35.1%) are their future top three priorities for adoption. Results from the survey found that the larger size factories tend to adopt more tools than the smaller ones i.e. ISO9000series, ISO14000series, and HACCP. In addition, clan culture businesses are the lowest adopter of these tools among other culture i.e. adaptability, bureaucratic and achievement culture