Total Quality Management

Total quality management originated in the industrial sector of Japan (1954). Dr Edward Deming is one of the strongest proponents of TQM. While the industrial revolution was happening in Japan after World War 2, the manufacturing companies started facing severe quality issues once they crossed a particular production volume. This was the time; Dr Deming explained the concept of TQM to the Japanese companies. The Japanese companies followed and implemented the TQM principles in their manufacturing, and rest is history they say.

The objective of total quality management is doing things right the first time over and over again. This saves the organization the time that is needed to correct poor work and failed product and service implementations (such as warranty repairs).

Total Quality Management is an integrated and holistic approach to quality management. Below are some of the founding principles of TQM:

• Customer satisfaction – Customer satisfaction is the central theme and objective
• Management responsibility – Management has bigger responsibility to ensure quality in the organization by setting the right culture and policies
• Employee involvement – The entire organization and every employee is responsible for ensuring quality including the senior management
• Process orientation – Standard processes for every activity becomes the way of manufacturing or development, thereby standardising the way the entire organization works and assuring the standard of the final product
• Continuous improvement – Continuous improvement of processes is the key to an ever improving organization
• Prevention over inspection – Ability to prevent defects is key over just finding defects through inspection
• Fact based decision making – Process efficiencies and outcomes to be measured and corrected as needed
• Integrated approach – Entire organization comes together to ensure quality
• Communication – Keeping everyone in the organization in sync is important

TQM today has become a philosophy for overall integrated management of organizations. Organizations will thrive only when they can deliver quality goods and services at an affordable competitive price. Hence TQM has become more of a need than a choice for most organizations.