National quality infrastructure: resources, services, and collaboration-oriented capability assessment framework

This paper aims to review the existing national quality infrastructure (NQI) capability assessment approaches and ultimately develop a more inclusive framework that addresses all components of NQI. Therefore, the study reviewed previous efforts and noticed that most of them lack comprehensiveness or focus on a few NQI elements and use few indicators readily available online. Therefore, this study addresses these issues and allows future researchers to consider this conceptual model for NQI capability assessment. Accordingly, the study review documents focused on NQI capability collected from different sources. Backward and forward literature searches were conducted to identify additional and up-to-date documents. Finally, content analysis was performed on selected literature to identify the possible NQI capability indicators. The identified indicators were further simplified and segregated into five NQI categories: standardisation, metrology, accreditation, conformity assessment, and the regulatory system. And three NQI capability alternatives: resources, services, and collaboration. Figure 1 shows the framework. Table 1, Figures 3, 4 and 5 summarise and depict each capability assessment indicator under the five capability categories and three alternatives. Therefore, this framework is used as an index to assess the capability of the NQI system.