This paper is an exploratory study on the success factors of Defence Quality Management System (DQMS) which is the certification system granted by the military for improving the quality of munitions. DQMS is established by adding military requirements to the ISO standard, thus, we especially focus on the additional requirements to figure out success key factors of DQMS certification. The 51 additional requirements of Korean Defense Specification (KDS) are empirically investigated from 67 companies that acquired DQMS certification. Firstly, we conduct an independent t-tests on 51 additional requirements of KDS 0050-900-3 to determine if there is a difference between an easily certified company and a hard-to-certify company, and obtain 8 requirements such as ‘Internal propagation of performance’, ‘Preparation of documented work instructions’, ‘Work instructions in the workplace’, ‘Documentation of equipment management’, ‘Inventory management’, ‘Packaging and identification’, ‘Guarantee of access to internal audit result for customers’, ‘Notification to the customer for improper product.’ Secondly, we carry out an factor analysis to the 51 additional requirements for classification, and figure out that 4 requirements among the 8 requirements above mentioned are grouped together in the same factor. The 4 requirements are ‘Preparation of documented work instructions’, ‘Work instructions in the workplace’, ‘Packaging and identification’, and ‘Guarantee of access to internal audit result for customers.’ The result of this paper will provide useful information to the company preparing for DQMS.

The DQMS (Defence Quality Management System) is a certification system that manages participating companies to improve the quality of munitions. Since Korean Defense Specification (KDS) for DQMS certification that was established by adding military requirements based on the ISO quality standard, many companies complain that they should pay too much effort into the preparation process. However, it is hard to find helpful information on the preparation process because we have been only interested in the effect of DQMS acquisition. The purpose of this paper is to provide helpful information to companies preparing for DQMS certification. We surveyed the degree of difficulty and importance of the DQMS requirements from the companies with certification experience, and performed IDA (Importance-Difficulty analysis) by dividing the companies into the main contractor and the subcontractor. The result of IDA shows that there is a different recognition to the DQMS certification between main-contracting and sub-contracting companies. Subcontractor has more difficulties than main contractor in preparing the DQMS certification. In addition, we are able to identify the difficult and important requirements in the preparation process to the DQMS certification. Both main contractor and subcontractor have difficulty to the requirements related to configuration or validation such as ‘customer controls configuration’, ‘configuration review shall be implemented’ and ‘design and development validation documentation.’ The requirements related to customers are important to main contractor but the subcontractor regards difficult requirements as important ones. The result of this paper would be helpful to both the company preparing for DQMS and the munitions quality assurance agency.