Self-assessment of the Company's Excellence Trend in the Time Series by Analyzing the Quality Cost based on the ARAS Method using Definitive, Interval-Fuzzy Information (Case Study: Ceramic Industry)

Continuous improvement is a basic principle of Total Quality Management (TQM), which addresses all aspects of the organization, products, processes, and even company management. The company's quality process can be fluctuate over time; In this regard, self-assessment of the company's performance at sequential time periods can identify the weakness of the company and provide more realistic results for the managers. The purpose of this study is self-assessment of the company's excellence trend in time series with quality cost analysis. Self-assessment based on the ARAS model which relies on definitive and interval-fuzzy information is a new approach, used to evaluate the quality performance of one of the ceramic companies in 32 time periods in this study. In this regard, based on the cost of quality in one of the active companies in the field of tile and ceramic, self-assessment done was carried out ARAS method, and since all the costs of quality are not definite, linguistic variables and fuzzy numbers for these variables have been used. Based on the analysis, the performance of the company in the second  six-month period of 1383 and 1381 was better with the points of 0.938 and 0.935 compared to other periods and in the first sixth-month period of 1390 solar year and second of 1395 it had the worst performance. The performance of the company in recent periods is almost declining and the research results are consistent with the assumptions of the PAF model. The company, with more investment in prevention and evaluation costs, has been able to reduce failure costs and have more sales and profits. As a result, the company, having analyzed its financial issues, has to return to its previous investment trend in quality cost.